Jeff Weintraub

Money can't always buy you love ...

2012-01-21T14:13:00.004-05:00

... as Mitt Romney is learning to his sorrow. Often, though, it is good for tearing down your opponents, as Newt Gingrich learned to his sorrow in Iowa, where his temporary lead in the polls was demolished by a wave of attack ads run by pro-Romney SuperPACs. But sometimes even that doesn't work reliably, at least for Mitt. Consider, for example, today's Republican primary in South Carolina, which Romney could well lose despite heavily outspending any of his opponents. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, deep down, they just don't like him.

Rachel Weiner sums it up (below) at the Washington Post politics blog.

—Jeff Weintraub

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Posted by Rachel Weiner at 12:11 PM ET, 01/20/2012

If former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney loses South Carolina Saturday night, it will be a very expensive loss.

From Jan. 16 through the Saturday primary, he and his super PAC supporters have spent more than any two of his rivals combined, according to a Republican media buyer.

[JW: Not exactly. According to the figures below, the pro-Gingrich and pro-Paul spending adds up to just slightly more than the pro-Romney spending. But the basic point holds. And whereas Gingrich concentrated most of his fire on Romney, the Ron Paul ads trashed Gingrich as well as Romney and Santorum.]

In Iowa, a deluge of ads from the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future buried former House speaker Newt Gingrich. In the Palmetto State, Gingrich is fighting back, thanks to a huge boost from his own super PAC supporters.

Romney also has more rivals to contend with in the south. In Iowa he was focused almost exclusively on Gingrich; now former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum has emerged as a serious rival and another big ad spender.

SOUTH CAROLINA AD SPENDING, Jan. 16 to Jan 21:

* Mitt Romney $858,155 + Restore Our Future $1,238,482 + Citizens for a Working America $202,642 = $2,299,279

* Newt Gingrich $337,763 + Winning Our Future $856,220 = $1,193,983

* Rick Santorum $667,810 + Red White and Blue Fund $406,447 = $1,074,257

* Ron Paul $984,538 + Santa Rita PAC $150,992 = $1,135,530

* Rick Perry $102,450 + Make Us Great Again $97,851 = $200,301

Total: $5,903,350

Annals of Chutzpah – Sarah Palin thinks we need "more vetting of candidates"

2012-01-19T10:43:00.005-05:00

No, that's not a parody. She really said it. (If you find that difficult to believe, see the video clip below).

Andrew Sullivan captures the joke here:

"More debates, more vetting of candidates. Because we know the mistake made in our country four years ago, with having a candidate that was not vetted to the degree he should have been," - Sarah Palin, the vice presidential nominee in 2008 whose selection process was negligible, who never released her medical records, and who never gave a single press conference before Election Day.

—Jeff Weintraub

The latest from the Republican slugfest in South Carolina — Ron Paul attacks his opponents for being dishonest, corrupt, and insufficiently right-wing

2012-01-17T10:36:00.008-05:00

At one point in David Weigel's running commentary on Monday night's Republican debate in South Carolina (The Massacre in Myrtle Beach: Live Thread) he offers this passing comment:

Sort of forgotten in the media's hazy coverage of Paul is that he runs, by miles, the most negative, record-based attacks of any campaign.

That jibes with other things I have read. And my impression is that most of these attack ads go out under Ron Paul's own name (commendably enough), rather than getting outsourced to allegedly 'independent' SuperPacs.

Weigel also offers, as an example, a new ad released by the Ron Paul campaign, which features direct and un-subtle attacks on Newt Gingrich ("Serial Hypocrite"), Rick Santorum ("Counterfeit Conservative"), and Mitt Romney ("Flip-Flopper" and father of ObamaCare):

According to this attack ad, Gingrich & Santorum & & Romney share "One Vision: More Big Government, More Mandates, Less Freedom".

This ad is interesting at a number of levels. Of course, given the character of the Republican primary electorate in South Carolina, most of the candidates are competing with each other to stand out as the most radical-right candidate in the race. (Romney, by contrast, just wants to convince Republican voters that he is reliably right-wing and also the most "electable" candidate to send up against Obama.) But they represent somewhat different strands and shadings of reactionary politics. So it is informative to see the specific grounds that this Ron Paul ad uses to pin the "counterfeit conservative" label on each of the other candidates. They illustrate some of the hot-button issues in current Republican politics, or at least the ones that Ron Paul and his campaign want to emphasize right now.

Most of the themes highlighted here are unsurprising. But it is intriguing that this ad attacks Rick Santorum not only for being insufficiently anti-union (a blemish on Santorum's pro-plutocratic purity that's not surprising for a politician whose political career started out in western Pennsylvania) but also, believe it or not, for being insufficiently hard-line against abortion. Santorum, let us not forget, is a candidate who has outspokenly condemned not only abortion but even contraception.

More generally, this ad helps to bring out the extent to which an obsessive jihad against Planned Parenthood has become a central theme in right-wing political discourse. Many of the attacks against Romney by his Republican opponents have emphasized that RomneyCare in Massachusetts not only paid Planned Parenthood for medical services but (horrors!) allowed a Planned Parenthood representative to sit on a state advisory panel. This Ron Paul ad doesn't even bother to spell that out in Romney's case, but instead charges that even Rick Santorum "funded Planned Parenthood" (double horrors!).

=> Ron Paul does not, in fact, have a "real plan to cut a trillion dollars year one and to balance the budget in three"—and, of course, any attempt to do anything along these lines in the middle of a recession would be economically catastrophic. But not all of his claims about his opponents are inaccurate or unfair. What a crew!

—Jeff Weintraub

The French Ron Paul?

2012-01-15T14:32:00.018-05:00

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Both the US and France will be having presidential elections later in 2012. The structure and dynamics of politics in the two countries are dramatically different in a lot of important ways, and it would be foolish to look for any close analogies. Nevertheless, I feel moved to share some speculative musings—no more than that—about a more approximate possible analogy. My musings were provoked by reading a string of troubling reports about the resurgence of the far-right National Front in France under the leadership of Marine Le Pen, daughter of the FN's founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. For example:

Sarkozy Just Ahead of Le Pen in French Presidency Election Poll

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy is just two percentage points ahead of anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen less than four months before the presidential election, an Ifop poll for Paris Match showed.

In the first round, to be held April 22, Socialist candidate Francois Hollande would finish first with 27 percent, followed by Sarkozy with 23.5 percent and National Front candidate Le Pen on 21.5 percent, the poll published today showed today. [Etc. ....]

Obviously, I don't intend to suggest any simple equivalence between Ron Paul and the Le Pens. In many respects, they represent two different varieties of reactionary politics. In the ideological spectrum of the American right, a figure like Pat Buchanan probably corresponds more precisely to the Le Pens, father & daughter, than Ron Paul.* The National Front, for example, is as far away from free-market-fundamentalism as one could imagine. It's true that both Paul and Le Pen are obsessed with protecting national sovereignty against real and imagined threats from multinational institutions, but for Ron Paul that's consistent with being a doctrinaire free-trader, whereas the National Front shares the distrust of free-trade "neo-liberalism" that runs across the whole French political spectrum. It's also true that Ron Paul has a record of appealing to racist and xenophobic sentiments (and his positions on immigration still paint a picture of the "Balkanization of America" caused by an uncontrolled flood of illegal immigrants, he supports a constitutional amendment to abolish birthright citizenship, and so on). But Paul's supporters and apologists are correct when they point out that these themes have not been prominent in his current campaign.

In both cases, however, we're talking about right-wing political tendencies that appeal to widespread beliefs and concerns in public opinion, but which until recently were considered too un-respectable and politically beyond-the-pale to be taken seriously ... and which are now riding a wave of anti-establishment feeling into political respectability.

As a candidate for the Republican nomination, Ron Paul seems to be stuck with a ceiling of somewhere around 20% support, only slightly higher in some states and somewhat lower in most others. But Paul's supporters are, on average, both younger and more fired up with enthusiasm than the supporters of the other Republican candidates (and they include a lot of people registered as Independents and even Democrats, not just registered Republicans). Furthermore, too many people who should know better have lost sight of the fact that he's a dangerous crackpot and are treating Paul and his candidacy with remarkably uncritical indulgence. If Ron Paul manages to keep his campaign active through the rest of the Republican nomination fight, which seems plausible, it may be hard for the Republican establishment to avoid making some accommodations with him and his constituency down the line. And I can't help being struck by the fact that Ron Paul has a smoother-but-equally-far-out son in the Senate, Rand Paul, who could conceivably wind up playing the role of Marine Le Pen.

(Of course, there are other far-right tendencies in the Republican Party that I also find quite scary, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm discounting those, but they can be left for another discussion.)

As for the Le Pens ... In 2002 the Narional Front's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, got slightly under 17% of the vote in the first round of the Presidential elections. The field was so fragmented by multiple candidacies that, to everyone's shock, Le Pen knocked the Socialist Party's candidate out of second place and went into the seond & final round of voting. But Le Pen was overwhelmingly repudiated by the electorate, who rallied around the incombent Jacques Chirac and gave him a crushing victory. (As one slogan memorably put it: "Vote for the crook, not the fascist.") Le Pen's share of the vote in the head-to-head stage of the election didn't quite reach 18%.

On the other hand, Marine Le Pen's figures have already reached over 21% in a much less crowded field. If she can maintain that level of support and expand it even slightly, she and her party could well break into respectability. It has been argued that in the period after 2002 the mainstream right has already shifted some of its positions to accommodate parts of the National Front's message and to co-opt parts of its constituency—but that has been true, at most, only unevenly and up to a point. If the cosmetic make-over of the National Front under Marine Le Pen succeeds in making the party politically respectable, that process could well be be reinforced.

Or these speculations could turn out to be entirely off-base, both for the US and for France. I hope so. Stay tuned ....

—Jeff Weintraub

* Although the contrast between the styles of reactionary politics represented by Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul is real and significant, perhaps one shouldn't overstate the gap between them, either. As my correspondent Robert Beckhusen reminds me, Ron Paul supported Buchanan in Buchanan's 1992 bid for the Republican nomination; and although Buchanan can't formally endorse a candidate this year because of his job with MSNBC, in practice he has come about as close to endorsing Ron Paul as he can get without saying so explicitly.

Tunisians greeting Hamas leader chant "Kill the Jews"

2012-01-09T12:40:00.007-05:00

The point about this incident is that it is not really news, in the sense of something exceptional or unexpected, but just a normal, routine event. So it's useful mostly as a reminder of some unpleasant realities. I know that some people think murderous anti-semitism is no big deal, and that harping on it is either boring or a form of sinister propaganda, but I guess I don't entirely agree.

(To pre-empt some of the standard evasions and excuses, when you hear "Yahud" in the video below, that means "Jews", not "Zionists". And yes, when far-right Jewish extremists in Israel chant "Death to Arabs", which happens on occasion, that's also disgusting and alarming.)

This comes via Point of No Return, an excellent website on the historical experience and current diaspora of the Middle Eastern Jewish communities, . For more on that history, including the fact that since 1948 there has been an almost complete ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab world (and at least 80% of the historic Jewish community in Iran is gone, too), see here & here.

(In Tunisia, there are still about 1,500 Jews, down from about 100,000 in 1956.)

—Jeff Weintraub

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Point of no return
Information and links about the Middle East's forgotten Jewish refugees
Friday, January 6, 2012
Tunisians greeting Gaza leader cry 'Kill the Jews!'

Cries of 'Out with the Jews!', 'Kill the Jews!' greeted the arrival at Tunis airport of the Hamas chief in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, StandWithUs (France) reports.

A few hundred people gathered on 5 January at the Tunis-Carthage airport to welcome Haniyeh. As they waited for him they sang antisemitic chants and slogans to the glory of Palestine and the liberation of Gaza. They carried Palestinian flags, the flags of the Ennahda movement, and the black flags of the Salafists.

Ismail Haniyeh was arriving in Tunisia from Turkey for a two-day visit.

Point of No Return commenter Sammish clarifies what the demonstrators were shouting:

Speaker(One person): "Kick the Jews"
Crowd: "Duty" [wajib] (It is a duty)

Speaker: "Expel the Jews"
Crowd: "Duty"

Speaker: "Kill the Jews"
Crowd: "Duty"

Read article in French
Crossposted at CifWatch

Romney cruising toward victory? — Maybe not quite cruising

2012-01-08T14:53:00.010-05:00

Well, the answer may be getting a little more complicated than it seemed. Romney is still at the head of the pack in New Hampshire, and it would be surprising if he doesn't wind up winning the Republican primary there. But the latest polls suggest that his lead is less dramatic than it used to be. According to the well-regarded Suffolk University poll, Romney's numbers have been slipping, from 43%, less than a week ago to 35% on Sunday, while Ron Paul's are increasing. Santorum's support is still in single digits, but support for John Huntsman (!) has inched past the 10% mark.

The latest 7 News/Suffolk University poll of likely voters in the New Hampshire Primary is great news for the Paul campaign and troublesome news for the Romney campaign. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, surged 3 points to 20 percent of the votes in a 7 News/Suffolk University poll released Sunday. On the other hand, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney dipped 4 points to 35 percent of the votes in the same poll.

Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman is the only other candidate to earn double-digit support in the latest New Hampshire poll. Mr. Huntsman garnered 11 percent of the votes to finish in the top-tier, but former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who has been riding a recent wave of momentum following his 2nd place victory in the Iowa Caucuses, pulled in 8 percent of the votes. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who once was a serious contender for second place in New Hampshire, earned just 9 percent of the votes.

Furthermore, the Sunday morning GOP candidates' debate, unlike the one on Saturday night, included some sharp attacks on Romney ... though it remains to be seen whether they did much damage. Jonathan Bernstein, for one, thinks not ...

Last night on ABC, none of the Republican candidates seemed very interested in attacking Mitt Romney in person. This morning, NBC moderator David Gregory didn’t give them any choice: The first three questions, and the first 15 minutes of the debate, were devoted to Gregory begging the candidates to attack the front-runner. What did they show? That a few attack lines in a debate aren’t going to change the structure of the nomination race.

... though some others are not so sure.

The upshot is that even if Romney does come in first in New Hampshire, which I think is what everyone expects, it may not be the crushing victory he was hoping for. The overall anyone-but-Romney constituency seems to be resilient, and when the votes are counted, one candidate, Ron Paul, may pull close enough to Romney to spoil his party. (If Ron Paul can't do that to Romney in New Hampshire, he probably can't do it to him anywhere.) Or perhaps not. Stay tuned.

—Jeff Weintraub

Is Mitt Romney cruising toward victory?

2012-01-08T14:15:00.006-05:00

As far as the Republican nomination contest is concerned, he might be. At the very least, according to the latest polls, he seems to be headed toward a crushing victory in the New Hampshire primary. South Carolina may be more complicated, but even there his prospects are looking better, especially if Gingrich, Santorum, Paul, and perhaps Perry continue to fragment the anti-Romney vote.

Meanwhile, the Republican candidate's debate in New Hampshire last night featured a significant, and surprising, dog-that-didn't-bark. There was every reason to expect that a number of the leading Anyone-But-Romney candidates, led by the irascible and resentful Newt Gingrich, would come together for an all-out assault on the front-runner. But it didn't happen. Jonathan Chait wonders why not (below).

=> For a useful round-up of other post-debate reactions, see here.

—Jeff Weintraub

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New York Magazine
Sunday, January 8, 2012 | 12:34 a.m.
Mitt Romney's Miraculous Free Ride Continues
By Jonathan Chait

The unchallenged march of the formerly pro-choice, self-described “progressive” father of national health insurance to the Republican nomination is one of the most bizarre political spectacles of my life. I am running out of explanations for it, including explanations that require party-wide conspiracies or science fiction. (Perhaps Romney has a force field that turns to mush the brain of anybody who threatens him.) The latest inexplicable event was Saturday night’s debate in New Hampshire.

The background here is that Newt Gingrich, after Mitt Romney crushed him beneath an avalanche of negative ads, spent the week in a state of fury and vowing revenge. The further background is that the one constant of Gingrich’s career is a penchant for rhetorical flourish. Generally he deploys this against Democrats (corrupt traitors who resemble child murderers) but occasionally he aims it against fellow partisans (like Paul Ryan, whose plan he described as “right-wing social engineering.”) All this had primed the campaign press to watch the enraged Gingrich unload on Romney. What would he call him – a progressive? A socialist? A congenitally dishonest, satanic agent of Obamunism?

Instead Gingrich, along with the other Republican rivals – or, at least, Republican former rivals who haven’t yet dropped out – didn’t turn any of the questions into attacks on Romney. Toward the end, Gingrich was asked to contrast his philosophy on the economy with Romney. He professed general agreement, and added, almost as an aside, that Romney was “a little more cautious” than him.

A little more cautious? What a moment Gingrich picks to err on the side of understatement for the first time in his political career! Is it the brain-melting force field? A secret backroom deal? No rational explanation can suffice.

Rick Perry, having already been the subject of campaign postmortems and left for dead, didn’t get the chance to go after Romney. Instead he has homed in on the primal essence of his selling point to the Republican electorate: he is the candidate of maximal violence restoring privileges to the dominant socioeconomic group. Perry endorsed a re-invasion of Iraq, claimed that if not forced to debate he would be firing weapons, and railed against the “war on religion” imagined by many Fox News viewers. He performed quite effectively, either because he’s improved or, more likely, because he wasn’t allowed to approach the speaking time threshold after which he exhausts his already-limited brain function.

Romney, in the absence of intra-party challenges, framed himself almost entirely in opposition to Obama. He previewed a new line of attack in response to positive economic data, comparing Obama to the rooster who takes credit for the sunrise. This seems like a shockingly weak line – if you concede that it’s morning, you’ve lost the argument.

Romney also repeated his claim that Bain Capital had created 100,000 jobs. His campaign had released the figure earlier, and Glenn Kessler discovered it was totally bogus. Romney’s campaign merely added together the new jobs created by a handful of companies Bain had purchased, without bothering to subtract the jobs lost at other firms. [JW: For more on this, see here.] Not only did Romney use the figure again, and not only did he misstate how it was compiled, he admitted that the method he used was bogus:

Romney: In the business I had we invested in, over 100 different businesses, and net/net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and the ones where we added? Those business have now added over 100,000 jobs. I have a record of learning how to create jobs.

Stephanopolous: There have been questions about that calculation of the 100,000 jobs, so if you could explain a little more, I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created, but not the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?

Romney: No, it’s not accurate, it includes the net of both, I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.

The number he used did not “get both sides of that.” Oh well -- there’s nobody around to call him on that, and there won’t be for quite a while.

Nick Cohen observes the march of political folly on both sides of the Atlantic

2012-01-07T19:34:00.016-05:00

In December an article in the English-language edition of Der Spiegel surveyed the field of Republican presidential candidates and pronounced them "A Club of Liars, Demagogues and Ignoramuses".

The US Republican race is dominated by ignorance, lies and scandals. [JW: The writer left out bigotry, xenophobia, and dangerous irresponsibility, which have also been abundant.] The current crop of candidates have shown such a basic lack of knowledge that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein. The Grand Old Party is ruining the entire country's reputation. [....]

No campaign can avoid its share of slip-ups, blunders and embarrassments. Yet this time around, it's just not that funny anymore. In fact, it's utterly horrifying. [....] They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster. They say one idiotic, ignorant, outrageous thing after another. They've shown such stark lack of knowledge -- political, economic, geographic, historical -- that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein and even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe. [....]

Tough times demand tough and smart minds. But all these dopes have to offer are ramblings that insult the intelligence of all Americans -- no matter if they are Democrats, Republicans or neither of the above. [....]

And so on. It's hard to disagree. Of course, horrified and contemptuous assessments of US politics along these lines by western Europeans are perennial, and are too often colored by knee-jerk anti-Americanism. But one must concede that, this time around, the Republican nomination contest has provided all too much evidence for such conclusions. Just as the man says, this spectacle would be hilarious if it weren't potentially terrifying.

On the other hand, it's also true that smug European denunciations of American society and politics can often be superficial, one-sided, and misleading. And America-bashing can serve as a tempting distraction, helping Europeans to ignore or minimize the absurd, dysfunctional, and dangerous features of their own political scene. I'm not just alluding to obvious buffoons and poisonous demagogues like Berlusconi and Le Pen. Among other things, Europe's whole political economy is now undergoing a complex and dangerous crisis of major proportions, and so far the responses of Europe's political, economic, and policy-making elites have been almost uniformly abysmal.

Two recent pieces by the British democratic-left journalist Nick Cohen, taken together, do a characteristically acute job of capturing this situation and sounding the alarm. The first is a British/American comparison titled "The Good, the Smug and the Blind".

The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week.

It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidate must sign up to if he or she is to make it through the primaries. [....] The approved list of right-thinking right-wing opinions explains why so many centrist Republicans who might have defeated Obama – Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush – have stayed out of the election. They were not politically correct enough for the fanatics at the grassroots.

How unlike our own dear Tories the tea partiers are, the Economist implies. While the Yanks are demented, the Brits are sensible, practical men and women of moderate temperament who abhor extremism and have no time for wishful thinking. No member of the coalition cabinet or editor on the Economist would sign up for any let alone all of the above.

Yet British conservatives hold extremist views on economics that are as wild as anything you can find on the American right. The Economist will not mention the failings because it shares them too. [....]

Too true. The second piece, based on an "Interview with a Danish Journalist", pointedly juxtaposes the Euroskeptical tendencies in British politics with the blind spots and unreflective wishful thinking of many Continental Europhiles. See below.

--Jeff Weintraub

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The Spectator
January 2, 2002
The Good, the Smug and the Blind
By Nick Cohen

The Economist has a rather good, rather smug and – in the end – entirely self-deluding leader about the predicament of the American right this week.

It is good because the Economist sets out with neatness and style what policies a Republican candidate must sign up to if he or she is to make it through the primaries. The aspiring president must believe not just some but all of the following:

That abortion should be illegal in all cases.
That gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it.
That the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home.
That the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame.
That global warming is a conspiracy.
That any form of gun control is unconstitutional.
That any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk.
That Israel can do no wrong and the 'so-called Palestinians', to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right.
That the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished.

The approved list of right-thinking right-wing opinions explains why so many centrist Republicans who might have defeated Obama – Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush – have stayed out of the election. They were not politically correct enough for the fanatics at the grassroots.

How unlike our own dear Tories the tea partiers are, the Economist implies. While the Yanks are demented, the Brits are sensible, practical men and women of moderate temperament who abhor extremism and have no time for wishful thinking. No member of the coalition cabinet or editor on the Economist would sign up for any let alone all of the above.

Yet British conservatives hold extremist views on economics that are as wild as anything you can find on the American right. The Economist will not mention the failings because it shares them too.

First, the right cannot admit that its policy of imposing austerity during a period of stagnation is – surprise, surprise – pushing Britain and Europe back into recession.

Second, British conservatives in particular cannot admit that the free market in high finance led to disaster, and a bailout that ought to have been so abhorrent to them it forced them to rethink their ideas.

I should add that I write this as an Economist addict, who becomes as fraught as a junkie without a fix if I can’t get hold of a copy on a Friday morning. But something is wrong there. When I began reading it in the late 1990s, Economist journalists predicted the collapse of the dotcom mania with brutal and brilliant clarity. Now they and the wider centre-right with the honourable exception of Vince Cable, don’t see crises in capitalism coming and don’t feel the need to work out why their ideology went wrong, and how their views must adapt if they are to see the world as it is again. It is the great intellectual failure of our time, and not only in conservative journalism.

----------------------------------------
The Spectator
January 2, 2002
Interview with a Danish Journalist
By Nick Cohen

He came to talk to me about British Euroscepticism, and I did my best to explain. I said it was far stronger in England than Scotland for nationalist reasons, and that although Labour MPs were, in general, mildly Eurosceptic — Brown would not take us into the Euro, for instance — Euroscepticism was a passion on the Conservative side.

‘I know some of the young MPs who supported Cameron,’ I said. ‘They’re incredibly liberal about gay rights and all the rest of it but on the EU…’

‘They’re not liberal at all…’

I had to explain to him that supporting a Eurozone that is imposing an austerity on Ireland, Greece, Spain, Italy and Portugal that offers them no way to grow out of recession was not, in normal language, a ‘liberal’ thing to do. [JW: Well, it's certainly "liberal" in the sense of 19th-century economic liberalism.] If anything Germany’s abhorrence of Keynesian demand boosting measures recalled Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose response to the Great Crash of 1929 was to say, ‘liquidate labour, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.’ Only liquidation could ‘purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.’

Needless to add, Hoover and Mellon’s uncompromising economic morality ensured that the Great Crash of 1929 turned into the Great Depression of the 1930s.

My Danish colleague found it strange to think that opposing Angela Merkel’s Depression-era economics and puritan desire to purge southern Europe for its sins did not make one a conservative. Quite the contrary, in fact. But the notion that allegiance to the EU makes one a progressive was embedded in his mind as it remains embedded in the minds of most European liberal-leftists. [....]

Is Newt about to go nuclear?

2012-01-05T09:23:00.006-05:00

Or, to use a different metaphor, is he planning to go postal?

David Corn sums up Newt Gingrich's reaction to the way that Mitt Romney's barrage of attack ads demolished his temporary front-runner status is Iowa. (Actually, Gingrich also got hit with negative ads by Ron Paul and others, but the one he really resents is Romney.)

In a bitter and spiteful concession speech last night in Iowa—Kanye West could do no worse—the former House speaker, who finished fourth, signaled a shift in his mission. [JW: You can watch it here.] He would no longer be running to obtain the Republican presidential nomination; he would be campaigning to obliterate Mitt Romney. He would be Sherman; the former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia.

If Gingrich does pursue this march—and there are two debates this weekend in New Hampshire in which Gingrich can be a suicide bomber—Gingrich will be reaching the peak of his 30-year career as a Republican demolition man. And now his target will be the candidate the GOP establishment believes possesses the best chance of unseating President Barack Obama.

Corn draws a hopeful conclusion:

Newt Gingrich has finally reached his destiny: destroyer of the GOP.

Maybe. Whether that conclusion turns out to be prescient, or a bit of wishful thinking, remains to be seen. It's certainly possible that, between them, Gingrich & Santorum & Paul and the other crazies still in the Republican race could wind up handing Obama a landslide victory. But it's by no means inevitable. I guess we'll see.

Meanwhile, Corn's piece offers a nice overview of Gingrich's political career so far, and of the significant role Gingrich has played in helping to poison American politics. Read the whole thing (below).

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Mother Jones
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Newt the Destroyer
Gingrich is now on a single-minded mission to detonate Mitt Romney's presidential prospects. Will he blow up the GOP in the process?
By David Corn

Newt Gingrich has finally reached his destiny: destroyer of the GOP.

In a bitter and spiteful concession speech last night in Iowa—Kanye West could do no worse—the former House speaker, who finished fourth, signaled a shift in his mission. He would no longer be running to obtain the Republican presidential nomination; he would be campaigning to obliterate Mitt Romney. He would be Sherman; the former Massachusetts governor would be Georgia.

If Gingrich does pursue this march—and there are two debates this weekend in New Hampshire in which Gingrich can be a suicide bomber—Gingrich will be reaching the peak of his 30-year career as a Republican demolition man. And now his target will be the candidate the GOP establishment believes possesses the best chance of unseating President Barack Obama.

Gingrich, as is widely known, entered the House in the late '70s, throwing bombs. He aimed them at both the stodgy leadership of the Republican House minority and at Democratic leaders, whom he routinely called "corrupt." For years, he hurled harsh and bombastic rhetoric, routinely comparing those with whom he disagreed to either Nazis or Nazi appeasers. It was often hard to keep track of his faux historical analogies. (For a partial list of his excesses, see this run-down.)

During his venom-laced rush to the top, Gingrich sought to institutionalize his hate politics. His political action committee, GOPAC, sent out a memo to Republican candidates counseling them to use particular words when describing Democrats, such as "decay," "betray," "traitors," "pathetic," and "corrupt."

>And "destroy." Which was Gingrich's intent—targeted first at his foes, but then, ultimately, at himself. Soon after achieving his ambition of becoming House speaker, he self-destructed. His ambition, arrogance, and lack of discipline triggered a mutiny among his fellow Republicans. He survived that episode, but after leading the impeachment crusade against Bill Clinton and suffering at the polls during the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich (who at the time was extramaritally trysting himself) resigned the speakership—rather than face the wrath of his GOP comrades who had (once again) had enough.

Thirteen years later, it was tough for Newt watchers to feel any sympathy when he whined about the incoming attacks mounted by a Romney-supporting super-PAC. His bleating about negative campaigning was, given this historical perspective, farcical. His claim that Romney was a "liar" carried little heft—after all, Gingrich himself had recently displayed his penchant for prevarication, such as when he claimed he had been paid by Freddie Mac for performing duties as a "historian."

But a presidential candidate scorned can be a dangerous thing. Gingrich has never had a self-esteem problem. His ego is supersized. And with his late-autumn jump in the polls, he, no doubt, was measuring himself for a crown. (Tiffany's?) He all but declared his ascendancy was inevitable. Yet then that nasty super-PAC came along and…told the truth about Gingrich, in killer attack ads, behaving much as Gingrich had always counseled GOPers to act. In a 1978 address to College Republicans, before he was elected to the House, Gingrich declared, "I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty." Well, if his goal back then was to nastify the GOP, he can proudly proclaim, "Mission accomplished."

But having been on the receiving end of Newt-like treatment, Gingrich is not going to quietly skulk back to his Newt Inc. empire and continue to cash in. First, it seems, he must crush Romney. Which is not such a hard task. At the upcoming debates, Gingrich will have plenty of ammo—all those flip-flops and whatnots—to blast Romney to smithereens. If Gingrich goes scorched earth, he can provide much material for Democratic anti-Romney ads and will obviously tick off the Republican Party pooh-bahs who have already decided that Romney is the only credible candidate in this sorry lot.

It will be as if a time bomb with a very long fuse has finally detonated.

The Republicans embraced Gingrich when his thuggish formula for success worked and returned them to power in the House of Representatives. But now that same explosive force can be trained on the GOP inner circle's favorite. Live by the Newt, perish by the Newt? Romney might be able to withstand the detonation of the Gingrich death star. But if Gingrich does go nuclear on Romney, it will be a fitting—and not unpredictable—end to a long reign of terror.

Romney continues to lie about his record, and Obama's, on jobs

2012-01-04T12:49:00.012-05:00

If we tried to keep up with all the lies, distortions, and prevarications being churned out by the Republican nomination campaigns, there wouldn't be time for anything else. (No, neither Republicans nor right-wingers have a monopoly on that sort of thing; but let's not try to pretend that there is anything like moral equivalence on this score.) However, since Mitt Romney is probably going to wind up being the Republican nominee for President (though that's by no means a done deal), and since a central theme of his campaign is that he's businessman who knows how to "create jobs," it's worth taking the trouble to point out that two of the central claims made by Romney and his campaign in this connection happen to be fraudulent.

As Greg Sargent argued yesterday, probably correctly:

It is now beyond doubt that Mitt Romney will be resting his case against Obama on two core claims.

The first: At Bain Capital, Romney created over 100,000 jobs, which proves he has the job-creation experience to turn the economy around.

The second: Under the Obama presidency, the country has actually lost jobs, which proves his record is a failure.

Sargent quotes a statement by Romney on Fox News in which Romney, once again, summed up this alleged contrast:

This is a president who lost more jobs during his tenure than any president since Hoover. This is 2 million jobs that he lost as President. [....] And I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs. By the way, we created more jobs in Massachusetts than this president’s created in the entire country. So if the President wants to talk about jobs, and I hope he does, we’ll be comparing my record with his record and he comes up very, very short.

[Update: Sure enough, Romney repeated these claims in the New Hampshire debate on Saturday, January 7. Factcheck.org examined Romney's claims a few days before the debate and rated them, generously, as "unproven" and "misleading", respectively.]

=> Let's take these two claims in order. During Romney's time as head of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, he and the firm were certainly successful in making huge amounts of money for themselves. In the process, did they really create "over 100,000 new jobs"? That's dubious, to say the least.

No one is quite sure about the overall figures yet, but it seems plausible that, on balance, Bain Capital's operations may have led to a net loss of jobs rather than a net gain. At all events, neither Romney nor his campaign have ever offered any solid evidence to support this claim of "over 100,000 new jobs".

Well, now that someone has squeezed a little information out of the Romney campaign, this claim turns out to be quite dishonest. Greg Sargent again:

Post writer Glenn Kesler pressed Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom to justify the 100,000 jobs assertion, and he offers this:
Fehrnstrom says the 100,000 figure stems from the growth in jobs from three companies that Romney helped to start or grow while at Bain Capital: Staples (a gain of 89,000 jobs), The Sports Authority (15,000 jobs), and Domino’s (7,900 jobs).

This tally obviously does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain.
Got that? Romney is only counting jobs gained at companies restructured at Bain during and after his years there — and is not factoring in jobs lost — in claiming he created over 100,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, as the Romney camp concedes to Kessler, in making the claim Obama is a job destroyer, Romney is factoring in the jobs that were lost during Obama’s presidency — before Obama’s policies went into effect. In other words, Romney is calculating a “net” number for Obama, and isn’t calculating a net number for himself. Just wow.

=> As Sargent just noted, it's clear that Romney's complementary claim that Obama "lost" 2 million jobs as President is also quite dishonest. Paul Krugman does an excellent job of spelling out how dishonest it is, so we can just leave that to him (below). Krugman's graphs are especially illuminating.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. A friend writes to add a significant point that is often overlooked:

The fact that Romney doesn’t have real numbers about job creation tells you something important (and obvious, if you think about it): Businessmen are not in the business of job creation [JW: i.e., when they do create jobs, that's a by-product of their pursuit of other goals, like maximizing profit, which can often entail job elimination instead], so they don’t track how well they are doing at it and their experience doesn’t equip them well to understand how it’s done. In economics generally, jobs are a cost and added costs are bad.

==============================
Paul Krugman (The Conscience of a Liberal)
January 3, 2012
Obama, Romney, Jobs

Greg Sargent is rightly outraged by Romney’s claim that Obama is a job destroyer:

Romney’s claim that two million jobs were lost under the Obama presidency is based on the idea that there’s been a net loss of jobs since he took office. In other words, Romney is taking into account the fact that the economy continued hemorraghing jobs at a furious rate after Obama took office — before Obama’s stimulus passed. But the figures show that once it became law, monthly job loss declined over time, and turned around in the spring of 2010, after which the private sector added jobs for over 20 straight months, totaling around 2.2 million of them.

I think this benefits from a figure:

Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.

By the way, that wiggle in the upward climb represents the temporary hiring of Census workers.

Now, if you wanted a more credible case of a president who presided over job losses at this point in his administration, how about this?

And the truth is that I did give Bush a hard time over his job record — although I’m pretty sure I never accused him of destroying jobs, or even of bearing responsibility for the recession that began on his watch.

Mitt Romney in Iowa, 2008 vs. 2012

2012-01-04T10:53:00.008-05:00

Interesting factoid of the day: In the 2008 Iowa Republican caucuses, Romney got 25.2% of the votes. Then Romney campaigned hard for another 4 years and poured millions of dollars into Iowa during the final stretch (including the money spent by allegedly "independent" SuperPACs on his behalf). And in the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses yesterday he got ... 24.55% of the vote.

(In 2008 Romney got 30,021 votes; in 2012 he got 30,015 votes.)

One might be tempted to conclude that there is a pretty firm ceiling on support for Romney in the Republican primary electorate—and all the national polls taken in 2011 suggest that this isn't true only in Iowa. New Hampshire seems to be an exception, so Romney must be relieved that the next Republican primary happens there. But soon after that, there's South Carolina ...

Some further details from Eric Kleefeld at TPM, below.

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Talking Points Memo
January 4, 2012 - 12:59 a.m.
The Iowa Caucuses: How Did Romney ‘12 Stack Up To Romney ‘08?
By Eric Kleefeld

So how did Mitt Romney’s performance in Iowa compare to the last time he ran for president, in the 2008 cycle — with the difference that this time, he has been the big national frontrunner?

In the 2008 caucuses, in which Romney made a major effort to become the conservative opposition to John McCain, he ended up getting 30,021 raw votes, 25% of the total vote, for a second-place finish — a humiliating finish behind Mike Huckabee’s 40,954 votes, 35% of the total. Indeed, that bad result threw Romney off his momentum going into New Hampshire, which he then lost to John McCain, who went on to win the Republican nomination.

Tuesday, Romney garnered … 25% of the vote again, and about 30,000 votes (the exact figure is still being tabulated).

In 2008, Romney carried mainly the northeastern area of the state, and the far west.

In the 2012 caucuses, he mainly carried the east (though the northeast corner had some strong posts for Ron Paul and Rick Santorum), and the major population center of central Iowa, Polk County (Des Moines). The west went mainly to Santorum, though Romney did carry a couple scattered counties in the west plus other areas of the state.

Newt Gingrich comes out and says it – Mitt Romney is a liar

2012-01-03T12:26:00.008-05:00

Of course, this is a pretty hilarious case of the pot calling the kettle black. But even Newt Gingrich tells the truth sometimes--usually by accident or in a moment of carelessness, but sometimes from a mixture of calculation and resentment.

For a while now, Gingrich has assumed the pose of running a sunny and 'positive' campaign while his Republican opponents attacked him with a barrage of TV ads. (His main reason for taking this tack, so much at variance with the vicious partisanship and rhetorical bomb-throwing that has marked his whole political career, was probably the fact that he didn't have enough money to run his own barrage of negative ads in response.) But in a CBS interview this morning he took the gloves off ... or, if you prefer a different metaphor, let the mask slip.

Some highlights:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose support in Iowa has withered after riding on top of the polls, on Tuesday called former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney a liar who would mislead the American people if elected to the White House - but added that he would still vote for him if Romney won the GOP nomination.

On CBS' "The Early Show" this morning, CBS News chief White House correspondent Norah O'Donnell asked Gingrich about comments he had previously made about his chief rival and the Super PAC whose negative campaign ads have hurt his campaign: "You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this Super PAC that has funded that, and you said of Mitt Romney, 'Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president. I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Yes," Gingrich replied.

"You're calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Well, you seem shocked by it!" said Gingrich. "This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC - it's baloney. He's not telling the American people the truth.

"It's just like this pretense that he's a conservative. Here's a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in 'Romneycare,' puts Planned Parenthood in 'Romneycare,' raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he's magically a conservative.

"I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid. I don't think he's being candid and that will be a major issue. From here on out from the rest of this campaign, the country has to decide: Do you really want a Massachusetts moderate who won't level with you to run against Barack Obama who, frankly, will just tear him apart? He will not survive against the Obama machine."

At the moment, the answer seems to be that Romney probably will emerge as the eventual Republican nominee, and would probably be a stronger candidate against Obama than any of the current alternatives—definitely including Newt Gingrich, whose past record includes at least as many policy flip-flops as Romney's along with a lot of other baggage. But anything is possible, so we'll have to see.

Yet, when pressed by CBS News' chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer on whether he could support Romney if the "Massachusetts moderate" became the Republican nominee, Gingrich replied, "Sure. I would support a Republican candidate against Barack Obama because I think Barack Obama is tearing the country apart.

"But, let's be clear," added Gingrich. "Which part of what I just said to you is false? [....]

"But Mr. Speaker, what you're saying is 'Folks, Barack Obama is so bad that we'd be better off electing a bald-faced liar to the presidency, somebody that we would never know if he was telling the truth.' That is pretty strong stuff," said Schieffer. [....]

Well, yes. But Schieffer was probably even more on-target than he realized, and perhaps a bit naive as well.

True, the widespread (and accurate) perception that Romney is a flagrant hypocrite and "a bald-faced liar", so that we can't believe anything he says, is in some ways a liability for Romney as a candiate. But at the same time, this perception is also one of Romney's greatest assets.

Many of those who support Romney, and who will wind up voting for him in the Republican primaries and the general election, are operating precisely on the assumption that Romney doesn't really mean any of the crazy, extremist things he is currently saying, and hasn't really repudiated his whole previous record and all the things he once claimed to stand for, but instead is just cynically prepared to say or do whatever is necessary to reassure enough of the Republican primary electorate to win the nomination. (That's the only possible basis on which someone like Chris Christie, for example, could have endorsed Romney. Many voters in the so-called Republican "base" liked Christie because of his abrasively pugnacious political style. But Christie himself clearly realized that many of his substantive positions, which he couldn't easily repudiate while being the Governor of New Jersey, would mark him as far too "moderate" to get through the Republican primaries.) We may get a chance to see whether those assumptions are correct. Meanwhile, for many voters, pundits, and politicians, the unspoken slogan of the Romney campaign is, or should be: "Vote for the hypocrite, not the lunatic."

Be that as it may ... it must be confessed that when Newt Gingrich accuses Romney of being a liar and a hypocrite, it's hard to disagree. It takes one to know one, I guess.

—Jeff Weintraub

Ron Paul and the paranoid style in American politics

2011-12-31T13:42:00.010-05:00

The John Birch Society is a notorious far-right nutcase group, founded in 1958 by a businessman named Robert Welch, whose trademark was paranoid and delusional conspiracy theories. In case you think that I am exaggerating unfairly when I use words like "paranoid" and "delusional," let me just mention that Robert Welch accused President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy" (no, I'm not making that up). That captures the general style of their world-view.

One might assume that the John Birch Society faded away decades ago, but no such luck. In fact, in February 2010 they hit the news as one one of the co-sponsors of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington DC. Now, in my opinion, a lot of the other CPAC participants, past and future, are already hard-right extremists only tenuously in contact with reality. But including the John Birch Society, no less, brought this tendency to the point of self-parody.

Nor is this just my opinion. Even some people sympathetic to CPAC and all its works, including a writer on the right-wing website Pajamas Media, Ryan Mauro, described this as a "monumentally stupid decision." Mauro also explained why even CPAC should continue to regard the John Birch Society as a fringe group beyond the pale of political respectability (as, say, William F. Buckley argued over four decades ago). At the very least, he suggested, "CPAC has made a major PR mistake in forming this alliance with JBS." For more details, including some information on the present-day activities of the John Birch Society, see here:

(In 2011 CPAC cut its ties with both the John Birch Society and the gay-rights Republican organization GOProud, which apparently were deemed equally bad for PR.)

But it so happens that one of the leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination is an open and enthusiastic fan of the John Birch Society. As you can probably guess, I'm talking about Ron Paul, who was a keynote speaker at their 50th anniversary celebration—not back in the 1980s or 1990s, but in 2008. If you like, you can see his speech on video here.

Ron Paul's very public alliance with the John Birch society was one of the points highlighted by James Kirchik in his December 29 piece on "Ron Paul's World" in the New York Times campaign blog. Kirchik has been a useful source of (carefully researched and accurate) information on some of Ron Paul's more unsavory activities and affiliations over the years. These include

the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. [....]

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories. [....]

Paul is proud of his association with the [John Birch Society], telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. [....]

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” [....] Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project [JW: which happens to be imaginary] was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. [....]

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. [....] As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

I know that some otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people (I am too polite to mention names, but they know who they are) have resisted acknowledging the undeniable fact that Ron Paul is not just a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte but an out-and-out crackpot. But they should try to face reality. The fact that a number of the other Republican candidates are also dangerous loons is not a good excuse for giving Ron Paul a free pass. And the fact that one might find some of his specific positions, or some of his pseudo-"libertarian" rhetoric, sympathetic is not a good enough excuse either.

Meanwhile, for those of you to whom this information about Ron Paul is news, I recommend reading Kirchik's latest piece in full (below). But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

==============================
New York Times (Campaign Stops)
December 29, 2011, 12:22 am
Ron Paul’s World
By James Kirchik

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Ron Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50^th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Walter Russell Meade on democracy in South Africa

2011-12-30T19:08:00.006-05:00

I can't resist quoting a passage (below) from one of Meade's recent posts. One can agree or disagree with the rest of the post. But I share these sentiments.

Yours for democracy & the oppenness of historical possibility,
Jeff Weintraub
===================================
Walter Russell Meade (Via Meadia)
December 27, 2011
South Africa: The Democracy That Will Not Die

[....]

South African democracy is one of the world’s more improbable success stories, and its future can never be taken for granted. It is a little bit like a giraffe; if you hadn’t seen one you would never imagine that it was possible.

The peaceful transition to majority rule and the establishment of an orderly majority government under Nelson Mandela was one of the political miracles of the twentieth century. That this miracle continues to inspire so many South Africans under such difficult conditions remains a great blessing and a sign of hope to Africa and the world.

The Republic of South Africa is one of the countries Via Meadia will be watching in 2012; the battle for South Africa’s future has implications far beyond its frontiers.

Where did the US federal deficit come from? (#2)

2011-12-30T17:31:00.015-05:00

A second reality check, to complement the item I just posted: How did the US federal deficit get so big? (#1). This one is less detailed, but in some ways more sweepingly comprehensive.

I think the graph below, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (based on estimates from the Congressional Budget Office), is fairly self-explanatory. But here are a few of its implications.

If we look at the current federal deficit and projected deficits for the rest of this decade, based on the assumption that currently enacted policies (like the Bush tax cuts) remain in place, then these deficits are overwhelmingly accounted for by two sets of causes:

(1) the current and long-term consequences of fiscally irresponsible policies by the Bush II administration, including the Bush tax cuts and two wars that weren't paid for; and
(2) the direct and indirect effects of the economic crash that began in 2007-2008.

That second category includes reduced federal tax revenues and the cost of various compensatory programs that kick in more or less automatically (e.g., increased unemployment payments)—at least, they used to function as "automatic stabilizers" before the Congressional Republicans embarked on their rule-or-ruin strategy of indiscriminate and monolithic obstructionism. It also includes policy initiatives undertaken during the Obama administration to counteract the recession, including the 2009 economic "stimulus" (without which the economic situation would almost certainly be much worse than it actually is right now).

If we leave out the Bush-era tax cuts, the unfunded wars in Iraq & Afghanistan, the direct effects of the economic crash, and the recovery measures undertaken during the Obama administration ... then the resulting level of current and projected federal deficits is indicated by that black line down at the bottom of the graph ("Deficit without these factors"). The long-term costs of Obama administration recovery measures are indicated by that light blue band running across the graph. Where does the rest of the deficit come from?

The next time you hear right-wing propaganda blaming the mushrooming federal deficits on "out-of-control spending" under Obama, propaganda that tends to get mindlessly repeated by too many pundits and alleged journalists, please keep this graph in mind.

—Jeff Weintraub

How did the US federal deficit get so big? (#1)

2011-12-30T15:53:00.028-05:00

At the end of the 1990s—i.e., at the end of the Clinton administration—the US government was running a surplus. Since 2001, the federal government has been running large and increasing annual deficits. So what produced these deficits? Where do they come from?

The basic answer is pretty simple. The two major causes responsible for size of the current federal deficit are:

(1) fiscally irresponsible policies of the Bush II administration, including the Bush tax cuts, two wars that weren't paid for, and a poorly designed expansion of Medicare that wasn't paid for; and
(2) the direct and indirect effects of the economic crash that began in 2007-2008.

That second category includes reduced federal tax revenues, the cost of various compensatory programs that are supposed to kick in more or less automatically (e.g., increased unemployment payments), and policy initiatives undertaken by the Obama administration to counteract the recession.

Actually, if we leave out the direct and indirect consequences of the economic crash, a surprisingly large proportion of the present and projected federal deficit can be attributed to just one cause: the Bush tax cuts. As Ross Perot used to say (memorably, if not always accurately), it's that simple.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq obviously cost a lot too, and their impact on the deficit was increased by the historically unprecedented decision to wage two major wars while reducing taxes for the wealthy. But the costs of those wars are presumably winding down, while the Bush tax cuts remain.

According to right-wing propaganda, "out-of-control spending" by the Obama administration is to blame. So how much has additional spending by the Obama administration, including the 2009 economic "stimulus" (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), contributed to the mushrooming deficits?

By comparison with the other factors, a fairly small amount. And even there one has to add two caveats. First, a lot of that additional spending really falls in category #2 above—i.e., the cost of policies undertaken to counteract the recession and to prevent it from turning into a full-scale depression. (To be fair, this caveat also applies to some of the Bush administration spending in 2008, including the TARP and the 2008 economic "stimulus".) Second, most of the new Obama-era spending is temporary, whereas the consequences of some of the Bush II policies, especially the tax cuts, are "structural" in the sense that they can be expected to continue into the indefinite future (unless the underlying policies are fixed).

=> These are all fairly obvious and undeniable facts. But a depressingly large proportion of current public discussion and political propaganda tends to ignore, obfuscate, distort, or deny them. So some reality checks would be useful

One good reality check on this subject is provided by the excellent New York Times piece below, from July 2011. I've also reproduced one of the two graphs that accompanied this article. (That graph, by the way, does not include the direct effects of the economic crash. But even without them, the comparison it presents is pretty clear.)

Some implications:

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. [....] Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.

Read the whole thing. It's brief and cogent.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. For another, complementary, reality check see: Where did the US federal deficit come from? (#2)

==============================
New York Times
July 23, 2011
EDITORIAL/DECONSTRUCTION
How the Deficit Got This Big
By Teresa Trich

With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here — from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.

Despite what antigovernment conservatives say, non-defense discretionary spending on areas like foreign aid, education and food safety was not a driving factor in creating the deficits. In fact, such spending, accounting for only 15 percent of the budget, has been basically flat as a share of the economy for decades. Cutting it simply will not fill the deficit hole.

The first graph shows the difference between budget projections and budget reality. In 2001, President George W. Bush inherited a surplus, with projections by the Congressional Budget Office for ever-increasing surpluses, assuming continuation of the good economy and President Bill Clinton’s policies. But every year starting in 2002, the budget fell into deficit. In January 2009, just before President Obama took office, the budget office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for 2009 and deficits in subsequent years, based on continuing Mr. Bush’s policies and the effects of recession. Mr. Obama’s policies in 2009 and 2010, including the stimulus package, added to the deficits in those years but are largely temporary.

The second graph shows that under Mr. Bush, tax cuts and war spending were the biggest policy drivers of the swing from projected surpluses to deficits from 2002 to 2009. Budget estimates that didn’t foresee the recessions in 2001 and in 2008 and 2009 also contributed to deficits. Mr. Obama’s policies, taken out to 2017, add to deficits, but not by nearly as much.

-------------------

A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels. Second, a healthy budget requires a healthy economy; recessions wreak havoc by reducing tax revenue. Government has to spur demand and create jobs in a deep downturn, even though doing so worsens the deficit in the short run. Third, spending cuts alone will not close the gap. The chronic revenue shortfalls from serial tax cuts are simply too deep to fill with spending cuts alone. Taxes have to go up.

In future decades, when rising health costs with an aging population hit the budget in full force, deficits are projected to be far deeper than they are now. Effective health care reform, and a willingness to pay more taxes, will be the biggest factors in controlling those deficits.

Time for The Nation to give up any lingering nostalgia for the Soviet Union

2011-12-30T10:33:00.005-05:00

In many ways The Nation has been, and remains, a valuable and admirable magazine. But for much of the 20th century it had a disgraceful record of fellow-traveling apologetics for Stalinism, the post-Stalin Soviet Union, and a whole range of other allegedly "progressive" and/or "anti-imperialist" dictatorships around the world. In 1981 Susan Sontag created a bit of a scandal in American left-liberal circles by pointing out, correctly, that if we imagined one person who read only The Nation between 1950 and 1970, and another person who read only (the right-leaning and intensely anti-Communist) Reader's Digest, the one with a better grasp of the realities of Communism would clearly be the Reader's Digest reader. (The Nation's coverage of North Korea from the 1950s through the 1980s also makes pretty embarrassing reading in retrospect, by the way.)

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the world-wide collapse of the whole Leninist project, the magazine appeared to have gotten over these infatuations. It's certainly true that, since the departure of the appalling Alexander Cockburn, no one writing for The Nation would actually try to defend Stalinist totalitarianism. But when it comes to equivocations and apologetics about the Soviet Union, it seems that The Nation can't quite break the habit completely.

The issue of The Nation dated January 9-16, 2012 includes a symposium whose agenda is to reconsider the Soviet Union in a more positive light and to suggest, or insinuate, that maybe the end of the Soviet Union was not such a Good Thing:

Virtually all American commentary about the end of the Soviet Union extols what the West is believed to have gained from that historic event. On this twentieth anniversary of the breakup, The Nation presents three writers who focus instead on what may have been lost. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union's last leader and first constitutional president, argues that a chance for a more secure and just world order was missed. Stephen F. Cohen, a historian and longtime Nation contributor, reminds readers of the political, economic and social costs to Russians themselves. And Vadim Nikitin, a US-educated Russian journalist, presents a new interpretation of pro-Soviet nostalgia. —The Editors

I react to this sort of thing with a sense of weary resignation, mixed with a bit of irritation. Spencer Ackerman, on the other hand, is appropriately apoplectic:

[....] So it’s with horror and frustration that I see The Nation is running a series of essays asking if the world is really, really safer without the U.S.S.R. I’m embarrassed as a liberal by this shit. The liberals I know — those of my generation, certainly — have no nostalgia for an empire whose chief characteristics were slaughter and mass immiseration. The Nation would rather be Soviet Union Truthers.

Because that’s what you get from this bullshit package. It’s not an affirmative argument that the world was safer with the Soviet Union around. That would actually be more intellectually bracing than this dreck from Mikhail Gorbachev, who really is a titan of history:
In short, the world without the Soviet Union has not become safer, more just or more stable. Instead of a new world order—that is, enough global governance to prevent international affairs from becoming dangerously unpredictable—we have had global turmoil, a world drifting in uncharted waters. The global economic crisis that broke out in 2008 made that abundantly clear.
Wait, a lifelong Soviet apparatchik is going to decry the irrelevance of the United Nations? The man who opened his eyes to the chronic poverty endured by Soviet subjects is going to sit in judgment on a superior system’s economic faults? This isn’t an essay. It’s historical-counterfactual equivalent of performative skepticism. Do we know for suuuuure that the Towers weren’t knocked down by a controlled demolition? Reaaaaally? What, you believe that was really bin Laden on those tapes…

These aren’t good-faith arguments. They’re not even forthright defenses of the Soviet Union. They’re juvenile attempts at satisfaction through reminding everyone that the world didn’t magically attain perfection after the fall of the USSR. The right response to that is to improve the world, not to cultivate nostalgia for one of the central reasons the 20th century was a slaughterhouse.

Stephen P. Cohen swipes at straw men “commentators” here, caring more about historiography than the thing-itself. He’s upset at the “triumphalist narrative” in the U.S. — because you’re being a dick by not shedding a tear for what truly was an Evil Empire, even if the hated Ronald Reagan said it:
Because its seventy-four-year role in the twentieth century is still bitterly disputed, because the way it ended remains so controversial and because the full ramifications of its disappearance are still unclear, its fate can only confirm the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl’s axiom, “History is indeed an argument without end.”
Suffice it to say there are many Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Hungarians, Finns, Ukrainians, Afghans and others who don’t really have much patience for Geyl in this context. If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed, ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.

Amen.

—Jeff Weintraub

What do Rick Perry & Ron Paul know about Canada that we don't?

2011-12-28T20:03:00.006-05:00

Governor Perry on the stump in Clarinda, Iowa:

Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source,” Mr. Perry said [....]

Loud applause.

Did Perry simply forget that Canada is a foreign country? That would be a typically superficial, elitist response. But perhaps this apparent blooper has a deeper significance.

Among the various paranoid conspiracy theories endorsed by Ron Paul over the years ... no let me put that a bit less judgmentally.

Ron Paul and others have discovered that there is a plot afoot to create a North American Union which, according to Paul, "would create a single nation out of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, with a new unelected bureaucracy and money system. Forget about controlling immigration under this scheme.” Ron Paul explained in 2006 that the first step in executing this nefarious scheme was the building of a proposed NAFTA Superhighway ("a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields") and added that "Governor Perry is a supporter of the superhighway project".

So maybe Rick Perry was just being prescient—or, to put it another way, was prematurely spilling the beans about the forthcoming North American Union?

=> OK, I'm being facetious. In the real world, both the NAFTA Superhighway and the plot to dissolve the US, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union are quite imaginary. But when Ron Paul denounces these imaginary dangers, he's not joking. And the fact that both Ron Paul and Rick Perry are potentially serious candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States is, unfortunately, also no joke.

—Jeff Weintraub

Iran threatens global economic Armageddon

2011-12-28T09:49:00.007-05:00

That's a threat of massive retaliation, not for a possible military attack against Iran's nuclear program, but for the next round of intensified economic sanctions being planned against Iran. There has been speculation about whether or not the Iranian government would respond by threatening to use force to disrupt the world's oil supply, much of which passes through the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf (or, as some call it, the Arabian Gulf). Now they have made this threat loudly and publicly: According to the report in today's New York Times:

A senior Iranian official on Tuesday delivered a sharp threat in response to economic sanctions being readied by the United States, saying his country would retaliate against any crackdown by blocking all oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital artery for transporting about one-fifth of the world’s oil supply. [JW: Actually, one-fifth is probably a low estimate.]

The declaration by Iran’s first vice president, Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, came as President Obama prepares to sign legislation that, if fully implemented, could substantially reduce Iran’s oil revenue in a bid to deter it from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. [....]

Apparently fearful of the expanded sanctions’ possible impact on the already-stressed economy of Iran, the world’s third-largest energy exporter, Mr. Rahimi said, “If they impose sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, then even one drop of oil cannot flow from the Strait of Hormuz,” according to Iran’s official news agency. Iran just began a 10-day naval exercise in the area. [....]

I think one conclusion we can safely draw is that at least some important tendencies in Iran's ruling elite are genuinely worried by the prospect of these intensified economic sanctions, despite frequent Iranian claims to the contrary.

A broader question is whether the sanctions — even if successful at lowering Iran’s oil revenue — would force the government to give up its nuclear ambitions.

One measure of the effects, however, is that the Iranian leadership is clearly concerned. Already the Iranian currency is plummeting in value against the dollar, and there are rumors of bank runs.

“Iran’s economic problems seem to be mounting and the whole economy is in a state of suspended expectation,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “The regime keeps repeating that they’re not going to be impacted by the sanctions. That they have more money than they know what to do with. The lady doth protest too much.” [....]

This Iranian threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz may well be a bluff, too. Using military force to choke off a significant proportion of the world's oil supply would be an act of war. It would be highly imprudent, not to say a bit crazy, for the Iranian regime to take the first step toward starting a war right now. And for what it's worth, they would be unambiguously in the wrong in terms of international law. Furthermore, if Iran did succeed in cutting off all oil exports from the Gulf, the economic consequences for Iran itself would be catastrophic.

On the other hand, if governments never did recklessly unwise or crazy things, the world would be quite different from the way it actually is. So we may be headed toward a major confrontation with unpredictable and potentially very serious consequences. The potential economic consequences are serious enough, even if the Iranians never actually try to blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Merely uttering the threat appeared to be part of an Iranian effort to demonstrate its ability to cause a spike in oil prices, thus slowing the United States economy, and to warn American trading partners that joining the new sanctions, which the Senate passed by a rare 100-0 vote, would come at a high cost.

Oil prices rose above $100 a barrel in trading after the threat was issued, though it was unclear how much that could be attributed to investors’ concern that confrontation in the Persian Gulf could disrupt oil flows.

The new punitive measures, part of a bill financing the military, would significantly escalate American sanctions against Iran. They come just a month and a half after the International Atomic Energy Agency published a report that for the first time laid out its evidence that Iran may be secretly working to design a nuclear warhead, despite the country’s repeated denials.

In the wake of the I.A.E.A. report and a November attack on the British Embassy in Tehran, the European Union is also contemplating strict new sanctions, such as an embargo on Iranian oil.

For five years, the United States has implemented increasingly severe sanctions in an attempt to force Iran’s leaders to reconsider the suspected nuclear weapons program, and answer a growing list of questions from the I.A.E.A. But it has deliberately stopped short of targeting oil exports, which finance as much as half of Iran’s budget.

Now, with its hand forced by Congress, the administration is preparing to take that final step, penalizing foreign corporations that do business with Iran’s central bank, which collects payment for most of the country’s energy exports.

The sanction would effectively make it difficult for those who do business with Iran’s central bank to also conduct financial transactions with the United States. The step was so severe that one of President Obama’s top national security aides said two months ago that it was “a last resort.” The administration raced to put some loopholes in the final legislation so that it could reduce the impact on close allies who have signed on to pressuring Iran.

The legislation allows President Obama to waive sanctions if they cause the price of oil to rise or threaten national security.

Still, the new sanctions raise crucial economic, diplomatic, and security questions. [....]

The American effort, as described by [David S. Cohen, ... treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence] and others, is more subtle than simply cutting off Iran’s ability to export oil, a step that would immediately send the price of gasoline, heating fuel, and other petroleum products skyward. That would “mean that Iran would, in fact, have more money to fuel its nuclear ambitions, not less,” Wendy R. Sherman, the newly installed under secretary of state for political affairs, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this month.

Instead, the administration’s aim is to reduce Iran’s oil revenue by diminishing the volume of sales and forcing Iran to give its customers a discount on the price of crude. [....]

Since President Obama’s first months in office, his aides have been talking to Saudi Arabia and other oil suppliers about increasing their production, and about guaranteeing sales to countries like China, which is among Iran’s biggest customers. But it is unclear that the Saudis can fill in the gap left by Iran, even with the help of Libyan oil that is coming back on the market. The United States is also looking to countries like Iraq and Angola to increase production.

Daniel Yergin, whose new book, “The Quest,” describes the oil politics of dealing with states like Iran, noted in an interview that “given the relative tightness of the market, it will require careful construction of the sanctions combined with vigorous efforts to bring alternative supplies into the market.” [....]

“The only strategy that is going to work here is one where you get the cooperation of oil buyers,” said Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You could imagine the Europeans, the Japanese, and the South Koreans cooperating, and then China would suck up all of the oil that was initially going to everyone else.”

That adds up to a lot of uncertainties—even if we ignore the possibility of a violent response by the Iranian regime. Stay tuned.

—Jeff Weintraub

Andy Borowitz explains the meaning of Hanukkah as a Judeo-American holiday

2011-12-27T07:26:00.003-05:00

For the close of this year's Hanukkah, a thought from Andy Borowitz of The Borowitz Report:

Hanukkah is the most American holiday because it's a celebration of burning oil that we don't have.

BorowitzReport 1 weeks ago

--Jeff Weintraub

The Arab League names a Sudanese general to head its humanitarian mission to Syria

2011-12-21T21:00:00.007-05:00

No, that's not a parody. It would be too heavy-handed for satire. Michael Rubin:

Several weeks ago, the Arab League made headlines when the notoriously ineffective body first chided and then sanctioned Syria. Alas, it seems the Arab League has now reverted to its usual, leaving the Syrian people the sacrificial lamb.

The Arab League just nominated Sudanese Lt. Gen. Mohammad al-Dabi to head its mission in Damascus. Previously, Al-Dabi served as the Sudanese government’s top representative for Darfur in which capacity he obfuscated international efforts to alleviate the mass murder the Sudanese government sought to perpetrate in that western province. With Al-Dabi in Damascus, what could possibly go wrong?

Among his other previous positions, General Al-Dabi has also been the head of military intelligence and security minister for the genocidal regime in Khartoum—which has, of course, received strong and unwavering support from the Arab League.

For more details on the pending arrival of Arab League monitors in Syria, see this article in Beirut's Daily Star. Few observers expect this mission to do much to stop the ongoing bloodshed and repression in Syria, so perhaps sending General Al-Dabi is actually appropriate.

—Jeff Weintraub

A more rosy view of North Korea (from Simon Winchester, via Mick Hartley)

2011-12-21T11:17:00.007-05:00

Among the many virtues of Mick Hartley's excellent Culture and Politics blog is that it offers a useful guide to bits of information about the exceptionally isolated bizarro-world of North Korea ... and also about the different varieties of apologists and cheerleaders for North Korea in the west. Not all of them are Stalinists by any means, and most of them would probably not want to live under a totalitarian Stalinist dictatorship (with racist, xenophobic, and dynastic-monarchical flourishes) themselves, but many of them seem to think that it probably suits Koreans.

Yesterday Mick Hartley picked up an illuminating expression of this outlook (True to its cultural roots):

You'd expect the Guardian to come up with something stupid on the occasion of the Dear Leader's demise, but it's more of a surprise to find this (£) in the Times today, from Simon Winchester..."Life under the Kims was grim. But at least the North has stayed true to its cultural roots."

Winchester spells that out:

The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.

To grasp the full absurdity of this encomium, it helps to know something about the concrete reality of "Juche". Yes, "self-reliance" (juche) was a central slogan of the regime established by Kim Il Sung. But in practice the claim of "self-reliance" was a sick joke—or, at best, an optical illusion—since in reality the whole system depended on a steady stream of subsidies from the Soviet Union (and, to a lesser extent, from China). Even with those subsidies, economic development in North Korea ground to a halt as early as the 1970s and probably began to regress. Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the subsidies dried up. And since the North Korean regime refused to respond with any constructive reforms or policy adjustments, the result was economic catastrophe for ordinary people, at least a million of whom died of famine during the 1990s (despite massive food aid from the outside world, much of which seems to have been diverted to the military, bureaucratic officialdom, and the elite). Paranoid, xenophobic, and truculent self-isolation, yes; self-reliance, no.

Also, it's a little misleading to say that Kim Il Sung asked only for North Korea "to be left alone". He threatened continually to re-invade the South, and undoubtedly would have tried it if there hadn't been a US military guarantee for South Korea.

If Kim Il Sung had succeeded in bringing the whole country under his rule, then perhaps South Koreans would now share the same blessings enjoyed by North Koreans. Winchester continues:

India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing.

Mick Hartley's observations are on-target:

Better a starving slave state, it seems, than this ghastly modern Americanised culture.

Conservative romanticism raised to a truly idiotic level.

Hard to disagree.

=> In the "Comments" thread following Mick Hartley's post, Martin Adamson adds his own two cents:

And it's not even remotely true on its own terms. The architecture of Pyongyang is Moscow 1952. The mass displays are China 1964. Painting is Soviet Academy 1936. Music is Gang of Four Operas 1974. Dress is Bucharest 1988 etc etc.

Ah, tradition ...

—Jeff Weintraub

What do we know about North Korea? (Fred Kaplan)

2011-12-21T09:59:00.004-05:00

Fred Kaplan gets right to the point:

Kim Jong-il, the pygmy tyrant of North Korea, is dead at the age of 69. His 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, now assumes the throne of Pyongyang. According to various press analyses, the new leader is either a bumbling naïf or a clever, multilingual operator who’s already formed alliances with key generals. He will either push market reforms or preserve the status quo. He will reach out to the West or step up confrontation or do neither.

Here’s the real answer: We really don’t know much of anything.

And by “we,” I don’t mean just the pundits. A few years ago, when the elder Kim was said to have suffered a stroke, and rumors churned of a succession crisis, I asked a fairly senior U.S. official whether even our intelligence agencies had much insight into the dynamics of internal North Korean politics. The official replied, “No.” [....]

Kaplan nevertheless manages to offer an intelligent and illuminating discussion of some likely possibilities and dangers for the near future, based mostly on analyzing the historical record. You can read it here.

In its foreign relations, the North Korean regime has always pursued a deliberate strategy of provocative belligerence, brinksmanship, and unpredictability, recently augmented by nuclear blackmail. This strategy has paid off in significant ways, and turned some of its intrinsic weaknesses into negotiating strengths, so it is likely to continue. The results are uncertain, though, and the stakes are, as Kaplan says, scary. Some highlights below.

—Jeff Weintraub

===============================
Slate
Monday, Dec. 19, 2011
Will North Korea Stay Crazy?
We know practically nothing about its new leader and what he might do. That’s scary.
By Fred Kaplan

[....]

Daniel Sneider, associate director of the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, says the regime’s politics are similar to the Soviet Union’s under Stalin, with one important difference: They are overlaid with a dynastic element, which underlies the ruling party’s claim to legitimacy.

Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-il’s father, was the first leader of North Korea, beginning in 1945, when the peninsula was split into two nations, the Soviet-backed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north and the U.S.-backed Republic of Korea in the south. He was a guerrilla fighter, battling against Japan in the Second World War. Afterward, he mythologized his record into that of a “Great Leader” (his nickname forever after) whose triumphs secured Korea’s independence. Since then, the Korean Workers’ Party, the Kim family, and a nationalist ideology of Kim Il Sung’s invention have survived as the inseparable elements of a single package.

This package ensured Kim Jong-il’s ascension to the throne after Kim Il Sung died in 1994. And it will probably ensure that Kim Jong-un is at least given a lot of leeway.

There is, however, a difference between the two successors. Kim Jong-il was 52 when he succeeded his father. He’d been groomed for office, and had held senior posts in the party and the regime for a quarter-century. By contrast, Kim Jong-un was a total unknown until January 2009, when suddenly his father designated him as the successor. (Kim had two older sons, but they were deemed unsuitable; one had stirred a scandal by trying to sneak into Japan on a false passport, so he could visit Disneyland.) The following spring, Jong-un, despite a lack of military experience, was appointed to the National Defense Commission. In October 2010, he was elevated to the commission’s vice chairman with the rank of four-star general.

When Kim Jong-il became leader, he continued his father’s policies and displayed a similar shrewdness for handling power. Kim Il Sung had regarded North Korea as a “guerrilla state” that would operate—as Scott Snyder put it in Negotiating on the Edge, a brilliant book about the Kims’ diplomatic style—as “a guerrilla fighter who has nothing to lose and yet faces the prospect of losing everything.” Kim also (rightly) saw North Korea as “a shrimp among whales,” and so maximized his leverage by playing the whales—the much larger, often hostile nations all around him—off one another. One way of doing that was to sow an atmosphere of constant “drama and catastrophe,” which also served to rationalize his repressive domestic policies.

Kim Jong-il played this weak hand no less capably than did his father, threatening to launch wars, build and fire nuclear weapons, unleash terror of various kinds—using the threats as blackmail to obtain much-needed economic assistance, in the form of food, electrical power plants, or (through various banking schemes, which went unexamined for many years) hard currency.

The Kims were particularly agile at playing their great neighbor, and at the moment best ally, China. In recent years, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have tried to persuade the Chinese to join them pressuring North Korea—through sanctions and other means—to abandon its nuclear-weapons program. Nearly all of North Korea’s trade comes through China. [JW: And North Korea relies on substantial Chinese subsidies to keep going.] If anyone has leverage over Pyongyang on these matters, it’s the leaders of Beijing.

But the Chinese are willing to go down this road only so far. They have no interest in seeing North Korea build a substantial atomic arsenal. Yet they have even less interest in seeing its regime collapse, which would probably send millions of North Koreans dashing for the Chinese border, creating a humanitarian crisis that Beijing has no desire or ability to deal with. [....]

When Barack Obama entered the White House, he was initially interested in resuming serious talks with the North Koreans. But now Kim Jong-il was resistant. It soon became clear that talking with the North Koreans was pointless and that the best thing to do was simply to ignore their antics, stop playing their game.

But the North Koreans do have nukes, perhaps as many as a dozen (even though they’ve tested only two bombs, each of very small explosive yield). They are working on missiles (even if all three of their long-range missile tests have fizzled). An unstable country with these sorts of things can’t be ignored for very long. Nor can it simply be bombarded. As the Joint Chiefs made clear to Clinton and Bush, when they entertained the notion, we don’t know where all their facilities are, and they have a few thousand artillery rockets near the South Korean border, which they might fire at Seoul in retaliation, easily killing 1 million or more civilians.

At some point, then, the game will start again. What the stakes and tactics will be, no one knows. Much of what happens will depend on a dynastic inheritor, not yet 30 years of age, about whose character, style, disposition, intelligence, and just about everything else, we know very little. That’s nerve-wracking.

If North Korea’s new leader is smart, he will play on that fact. He will, at certain key moments, behave like a loon. And that will raise two further questions: Is the craziness strategic, or is it real? And which of those two possibilities is more dangerous?

North Korea, the black hole

2011-12-19T21:56:00.008-05:00

Can you spot the difference between North Korea and South Korea in the satellite photo below? The commentary by Matt Yglesias, who posted this striking photo, is not written with great elegance or complete precision, but it does zero in on the crucial points:

The absolute tragedy of malgovernance and suffering that is North Korea [and] that will probably continue for some time yet despite the death of Kim Jong Il does serve as probably the most convenient illustration imaginable of the importance of political and economic institutions in shaping human destiny. North Korea and South Korea have similar geography, similar culture, similar racial/demographic issues, and totally different economic output thanks overwhelmingly to completely different political systems.

Actually, their social and economic systems are also dramatically different, not just their political systems. But in an ultra-Stalinist totalitarian dictatorship like the one ruling North Korea, all those dimensions are part of one package. So in that sense Yglesias's formulation is basically right.

Lest one imagine that North Korea has simply found a way to solve the problem of light pollution, the economic contrast between the two Koreas is also vividly captured by the following graph (from here). Admittedly, economic estimates for a closed society like North Korea involve a fair amount of guesswork. But my impression is that the assessments here broadly accord with the consensus of serious analysts.

And even this graph fails to convey the full awfulness of living conditions for most of the North Korean population. No one is quite sure how many North Koreans died of famine during the 1990s, but most serious estimates range from about a million to several million, and hunger remains pervasive—all this despite massive food aid from the outside world and ongoing subsidies from China and other sources, including South Korea until fairly recently. As Nick Eberstadt has written:

Today, North Korea has the awful distinction of being the only literate and urbanized society in human history to suffer mass famine in peacetime. And North Korea's hunger problem continues to this day: Pyongyang has relied upon "emergency" international humanitarian relief for over a decade and a half. Earlier this year the DPRK lodged an urgent appeal to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) for another round of food aid. North Korea is thus the world's first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.

Even if North Korea were more prosperous, it would still be a horrifically repressive totalitarian police state, the closest contemporary equivalent to the world depicted by Orwell in 1984, ruled by a semi-deranged power elite. But in addition, North Korea's experiment in totalitarianism has been a spectacular failure in economic terms. If any of this sounds exaggerated, it's not.

Nor is it easy to imagine optimistic scenarios for the foreseeable future. There is no reason to believe that the North Korean regime has either the desire or the capacity to effectively reform itself. And the dysfunctional character of the regime is, perversely enough, one of its key assets in its strategy of international brinksmanship. The current situation, in which an unpredictable, paranoid, and deliberately erratic regime armed with nuclear weapons rules over an impoverished, terrorized, and isolated population, is scary enough. But what really scares North Korea's neighbors out of their wits is the prospect that this horrible regime might collapse, unleashing a tidal wave of refugees and requiring the reconstruction and recuperation of a devastated and deeply distorted society. That will be a crushing burden in economic terms alone, and nobody is eager to take on the task. South Korea, in particular, would prefer not to think ahead to this situation, even though it is very likely to materialize within a generation.

—Jeff Weintraub

Calvin and his father argue about astronomy and the logic of scientific explanation (continued)

2011-12-19T17:18:00.026-05:00

Here's a scientific follow-up to my earlier post, Calvin (of "Calvin & Hobbes") on how we should interpret trends:

Calvin:

Since September it’s just gotten colder and colder. There’s less daylight now, I’ve noticed too. This can only mean one thing – the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice.

Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Calvin's father is right about the cyclical character of the seasons, and he's right to think that this seasonal cycle has something to do with the earth's revolution around the sun. He is also right on the more general analytical point that when you see a trend, you can't assume it will simply continue indefinitely. This happens to be a very important point to grasp, since it is so often disregarded. (Remember Dow 36,000?)

=> However, an e-mail message from my friend Eugene Matusov (which I quote with his permission) reminds me that I should have added a significant caveat. Eugene is a socio-cultural psychologist, originally from the former Evil Empire, who is now at the School of Education of the University of Delaware. But he was once a physics teacher. And he can't resist pointing out that the scientific explanation for the cycle of the seasons offered by Calvin's father is, in fact, erroneous.

As a former physics teacher I can’t let pass the following misconception, “Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.” It is clear that the dad “forgot” that the Southern hemisphere experiences spring in September as it gets more light from the sun. It cannot be true that for the Northern hemisphere the earth is moving farther from the sun in its orbit at the same time that, for the Southern hemisphere, the earth is moving closer to the sun. Something is missing in this explanation. It is interesting that the great majority of my undergraduate students, future teachers, reason like the dad. They often use seasons as an example of a scientific fact that they know well and can easily explain, but they get the explanation wrong.

The earth's orbit around the sun is somewhat elliptical, not perfectly circular, so our distance from the sun does vary slightly during the year. But that's not what causes the change of seasons. The real explanation is a little more complicated. It has to do with the fact that the axis of the earth's own rotation is tilted at an angle with respect to the sun, and the tilt of this axis remains constant as the earth goes around the sun each year. So the part of the earth tilted toward the sun changes over time. When the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun it gets warmer, when it's tilted away from the sun it gets colder, and vice-versa for the southern hemisphere. If you're interested, the process is nicely illustrated here.

The misunderstanding of this point demonstrated by Calvin's dad seems to be widely shared. For a 1987 documentary film on science teaching cited by Michael O'Hare, the film-makers went to a Harvard graduation and asked 23 randomly selected graduating seniors, faculty, and alumni why we have seasons; 21 out of 23 gave the same superficially-plausible-but-obviously-incorrect answer as Calvin's dad.

=> All this suggests some interesting lessons ... which I will mostly leave to readers to draw for themselves. But here are a few offhand remarks.

One of Piaget's seminal insights early in his career was that if we want to understand how people think, we can sometimes learn as much from analyzing common errors as from analyzing correct answers. I think that's true in this case.

There are certain errors and misconceptions we can expect to hear from uneducated people, but there are also certain errors and misconceptions that are especially characteristic of half-educated people. Unfortunately, even those of us who have accumulated many years of formal education tend to be half-educated, at most, in a lot of areas outside our specific fields of expertise. The blooper repeated by Calvin's father and those Harvard graduates looks like a typical example of a half-educated error.

The premise for the explanation they offered was an underlying model of celestial reality in which the earth circles around the sun rather than the other way around. It's worth emphasizing that this astronomical model is not based on common-sense observation. On the contrary, it's a rather counter-intuitive abstract model which comes to us from "science," usually via formal schooling, and which we generally accept on the authority of "science". I suspect that most people in this society, if they think about the matter at all, accept this heliocentric model of the solar system as an established and taken-for-granted scientific "fact" (unlike, say, the theory of evolution, where epistemological resistance is stronger for ideological reasons). For what it's worth, I think we're right to accept it, and I am convinced that this theoretical model brings us closer to reality than simple common sense.

The problem arises when such models, and other scientific "facts" we swallow in the course of our schooling, don't serve as a basis for thinking further but instead are used as a substitute for further thinking, or even a barrier to further thinking. So those half-baked ideas get repeated with confidence and self-satisfaction, but the confidence is misplaced.

As I said, most of us are half-educated, at best, in many areas we don't deal with on a regular basis. (And, unfortunately, that holds true for a lot of the public issues we have to consider as citizens.) But anyone who has spent time in professional and/or academic circles, and has been paying attention, ought to be aware of another dirty little secret—namely, that many people who have picked up the standard training and credentials are, nevertheless, only half-educated in their alleged fields of expertise. A reliance on jargon and superficial formulas in place of actual thinking is often one sign of this condition, but far from the only sign. I'm sure that somewhere or other Calvin had something illuminating to say about this problem, too.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

Christmastime for the Jews – A seasonal collection

2011-12-19T12:58:00.005-05:00

These will be new for some of you, re-runs for others, but timely for all (or so I hope). With good will for Jews and goyim alike. —Jeff Weintraub

Jewish Christmas - The Chinese connection

Christmastime for the Jews (contd.)

All I want for Christmas is ... Jews (Pseudo-Mariah Carey)

Calvin (of "Calvin & Hobbes") on how we should interpret trends

2011-12-19T12:14:00.010-05:00

Via Brad DeLong. (For a scientific follow-up, see here.) —Jeff Weintraub
---------------------------------------------------------
Calvin:

Since September it’s just gotten colder and colder. There’s less daylight now, I’ve noticed too. This can only mean one thing – the sun is going out. In a few more months the Earth will be a dark and lifeless ball of ice.

Dad says the sun isn't going out. He says its colder because the earth’s orbit is taking us farther from the sun. He says winter will be here soon.

Isn’t it sad how some people’s grip on their lives is so precarious that they’ll embrace any preposterous delusion rather than face an occasional bleak truth?

Mapping the political geography of US Presidential elections

2011-12-17T15:26:00.024-05:00

As we all know, representations of reality shape perceptions of reality. A map of the US in which states are weighted by their electoral votes conveys a somewhat different picture of the overall shape of the American Presidential-election universe than a purely geographic or spatial map. Here are some examples (from 2008).

The first is a Cartogram of predicted 2008 election results based on data from FiveThirtyEight.com, presented by Jason Morrison's photostream. The explanatory code for this map is given here, along with some other electoral maps. Blue meant safe for Obama, red meant safe for McCain, and so on. The predictions were largely on-target, but I think what's most striking is the way this map conveyed the information.

(See that pure-red belt of states running from Texas up to the Canadian border, broadening out to take in Montana and Idaho at the top? On a purely spatial map of the US, of the sort one usually sees on the TV news, that portion of the country looks enormous. See here for an example, or the 2004 election map toward the end of this post. But in terms of comparative population figures, many of those states come close to being just big stretches of empty space. If it weren't for the fact that the Constitution gives each of them at least 3 electoral votes, some of those states would look even more minuscule on this map than they do now. California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, on the other hand ....)

Another map, also based on calculations from FiveThirtyEight.com, tried to do something similar while preserving each state's familiar shape. I suspect that for most of you this map will probably look less 'distorted' than the first one, even though it fragments the country. Or am I wrong about that?

-----

And here is yet another Electoral College Map from 2008, this one constructed by polling meta-analysts at the Princeton Election Consortium (further details here). I think this representation is even more striking than the one in the first map, and the projected outcomes turned out to be even more precise.

-----

=> And now, for the sake of contrast, here is a more standard-format election map for the 2004 US Presidential election (using the same post-2000 convention of red for Republican and blue for Democratic).

At first glance, that looks like a lot of red, doesn't it? Would you guess from this map that John Kerry came within a whisker of winning the electoral vote? (A switch of about 1% of the votes in Ohio—whose official results, incidentally, smelled a little fishy to some people—from red to blue would have given that state to Kerry and, with it, an Electoral College majority. You can check the figures here.)

=> There is actually a discipline called "political geography" with historical roots that go back to 19th-century France, Germany, and Britain; and I suppose these maps bring the tools of computer graphics to political geography. But that's just a new technological twist on an old story. Every kind of map has a perspective, and all cartographic projections are necessarily stylizing and selective. (And, in their own distinctive ways, weirdly distorting—consider the size of Greenland on a Mercator projection, for example.) That's true for physical maps, but even more for socio-political maps ... and, as it happens, most maps we see embody socio-political world-views.

For example, consider the intriguing but usually taken-for-granted fact that on almost all world maps not intended for specialized topographical or scientific purposes, the entire land surface of the earth is divided up into different countries, each with a precisely drawn border, on the premise that every patch of dirt must be part of one and only one of these political units. In the exceptional cases where some maps use dotted lines, that marks a political, conceptual, and symbolic anomaly. In this sense, the maps portray a Hobbesian or Westphalian world defined by mutually exclusive sovereignties. There's nothing natural, obvious, or inevitable about representing or conceiving the world that particular way. It means something.

—Jeff Weintraub

"Can men and women be just friends?" — A survey

2011-12-14T11:32:00.005-05:00

Via AllahPundit & Normblog:

Of course, the responses included in this video are probably selective, so we don't know whether or not they're statistically representative. We don't even know whether this was a real survey or a clever spoof. Still ...

—Jeff Weintraub

The Onion concedes that political parody can no longer keep up with reality

2011-12-13T08:12:00.004-05:00

So with this story, The Onion decided to throw in the towel and simply play it straight. A headline was sufficient. --Jeff Weintraub

Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons

Also, no sleeping under bridges (Anatole France & Paul Krugman)

2011-12-03T15:51:00.003-05:00

There's a wickedly penetrating line by Anatole France that nicely captures the difference between purely formal equality and actual substantive equality:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. (Le lys rouge, 1894)

Paul Krugman is reminded of that saying by the latest Republican venture in unintentional self-parody:

They just can’t help themselves:
In addition, Senate Republican leaders would go after “millionaires and billionaires,” not by raising their taxes but by making them ineligible for unemployment compensation and food stamps and increasing their Medicare premiums.
I mean, there are lots of millionaires on food stamps, right?

—Jeff Weintraub

Anti-semitic propaganda then and now (Mick Hartley)

2011-11-19T17:00:00.016-05:00

Mick Hartley posted the item below in February 2009, but it remains timely. Hartley begins by quoting from Edward Rothstein's reflections in the New York Times after visiting an exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda". Here is one of Rothstein's insights, about the world-shaping power of propaganda in general and of Nazi propaganda in particular, which he elaborates over several paragraphs:

[I]f this is how powerfully these images affect an early-21st-century viewer who would have been a prospective victim, imagine the power they had on believers, flattering their highest vision of themselves while reminding them that endangering this imminent utopia was the conniving Jew, known from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one 1943 poster a giant hand points accusingly at a corpulent caricature wearing a yellow star, “Jude”: “He is to blame for the war!” This, of course, while Jews were being carried off on trains heading east to feed the crematoriums.

The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they short-circuit argument. To suggest that perhaps this caricatured figure was not to blame for the war would be like insisting on an alternate universe. [....] Exorcism and murder were not a policy; they were a responsibility. [...]

[We need to grasp] what was so powerful about Nazi propaganda: It didn’t just distort reality to make an argument; it reshaped it. It tapped into mythic beliefs about Jews being genocidal and inhuman, thus spurring retaliation.

And so on. Rothstein asks:

Is anything rhetorically comparable today?

As a matter of fact, yes.

It is unpleasant, but occasionally useful and necessary, to remind ourselves that we live in an era when significant portions of the world are flooded by virulently anti-semitic discourse and propaganda reminiscent of Europe during the 1890s or even the 1930s, which too many people in other parts of the world try to whitewash, ignore, or explain away. And it's not just a question of analogies, as the work of Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and others has made clear. There are also historical links and transmissions. Many of the key themes and images in present-day anti-semitic discourse, not least in the Arab and Muslim worlds, are drawn directly from sources in 19th- and 20th-century European anti-semitism, including that ever-popular forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a best-seller in the Middle East today) as well as Nazi and fascist propaganda of the 1930s and 1940s. (One implication, by the way, is that many of the most poisonous features of anti-semitic discourse and ideology in the Arab & Islamic worlds over the past half-century or so do not simply have their roots in Islam itself, but involve the importation and appropriation of important elements from European anti-semitism, Christian and post-Christian.) These anti-semitic themes and images been updated, and blended with other elements, religious and racist and otherwise, in a rich variety of ways. But the roots still sometimes show through.

More on all this another time. Meanwhile, read the rest of Mick Hartley's post (below).

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Mick Hartley (Politics & Culture)
February 26, 2009
The Strongest Contemporary Analogy

Edward Rothstein in the NYT visits a new exhibition at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, “State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda":

As the show, organized by Steven Luckert, winds its way from the beginnings of Nazism in the aftershocks of the First World War to the Allied attempt to eradicate Nazi propaganda after the Second, the effect is overwhelming. Conceptually everything is familiar: the foundering Weimar Republic, the celebrations of Aryan virility, the Jew as embodiment of evil, the mass rallies, the death camps, the defeat. But the effect is not in the facts but in the images and artifacts, many of which have been lent by institutions in Europe for this show.

And if this is how powerfully these images affect an early-21st-century viewer who would have been a prospective victim, imagine the power they had on believers, flattering their highest vision of themselves while reminding them that endangering this imminent utopia was the conniving Jew, known from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one 1943 poster a giant hand points accusingly at a corpulent caricature wearing a yellow star, “Jude”: “He is to blame for the war!” This, of course, while Jews were being carried off on trains heading east to feed the crematoriums.

The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they short-circuit argument. To suggest that perhaps this caricatured figure was not to blame for the war would be like insisting on an alternate universe. The accusation could be rejected only if everything were rejected. Exorcism and murder were not a policy; they were a responsibility. They all flowed out of these posters and their associated beliefs. [...]

The museum is developing a curriculum based on the show that will probe the notion of propaganda and examine contemporary implications. But here the slope becomes slippery. How much does the Nazi manipulation of media reveal about propaganda’s misuse in democratic societies? Does the extreme example shed light on the commonplace, without the dangers of the extreme being lessened, the dangers of the commonplace amplified?

Such analogies risk slighting what was so powerful about Nazi propaganda: It didn’t just distort reality to make an argument; it reshaped it. It tapped into mythic beliefs about Jews being genocidal and inhuman, thus spurring retaliation. Is anything rhetorically comparable today?

Perhaps. The exhibition points out that the Nazis financed anti-Semitic broadcasts by Haj Amin al-Husseini, “an Arab nationalist and prominent Muslim religious leader.” Now no sponsorship seems needed. Major Middle East media outlets have asserted that Jews use children’s blood to bake matzos. In recent weeks we have heard that Jews are following the nefarious plot outlined in the Protocols to exterminate all gentiles, this from the poet and former member of the Lebanese Parliament Ghassan Matar. An Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, has described Jews being “as smooth as a viper”: “Dispatch those son of apes and pigs to the Hellfire.”

And an Egyptian cleric with strong ties to the West, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradhawi, has described Jews as “a profligate, cunning arrogant band of people”: “Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the very last one.” [JW: For more from Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely described as a "moderate" Islamist, see HERE. Incidentally, "Yahud" means "Jews", not "Zionists".]

The extent of these visions (chronicled by the Middle East Media Research Institute), the historical distortions they codify and the readiness with which they are taught to children and are secularized into political action suggest that the strongest contemporary analogy to Nazi propaganda may be one the exhibition leaves unmentioned.

And, right on cue as it were, here's the latest item from MEMRI TV: Egyptian cleric Ahmad Abd Al-Salam on the Islamic Al-Nas TV channel, clarifying a point which may have been troubling some of his audience.

The Jews "will not fail to corrupt" the believers. What does it mean? The Jews are never remiss – they invest their utmost efforts, day and night, in conspiring how to corrupt the Islamic nation, the nation led by the Prophet Muhammad. I want you, Muslim viewers, to imagine the Jews sitting around a table, conspiring how to corrupt the Muslims, and how to destroy their worldly and religious affairs. The Jews "will not fail to corrupt you," and this is why we hate them. The Jews conspire day and night to destroy the Muslims' worldly and religious affairs. The Jews conspire to destroy the economy of the Muslims. The Jews conspire to infect the food of the Muslims with cancer. It is the Jews who infect food with cancer and ship it to Muslim countries.

We hate the Jews because they spare no effort in stripping Muslim girls of their clothes. It is the Jews who conspire to have Muslim girls, and even married Muslim women, wear clothes that are tight, short, or see-through, or clothes that are open from the front, or the back, from the right or the left. The Jews "will not fail to corrupt you," and this is why we hate them. The Jews conspire to destroy Muslims. The Jews conspire to bring Muslim youth down to the pit of sexual temptation. The sexual temptations, which are prevalent worldwide, were conspired by the Jews.

Clear enough?

The collapse of financial regulation since 1980 & its consequences — Lawrence Lessig sums it up

2011-11-19T09:37:00.012-05:00

I noticed an on-line interview with Lawrence Lessig on the subject of his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—And a Plan to Stop It, which deals with the pervasive plutocratic corruption of our political system over the past several decades. Some of the ideas in the interview strike me as questionable, but most of them are clearly on-target, and it's worth reading the whole thing.

For the moment, I just want to highlight one very trenchant passage:

Before 2008, the zeitgeist was deregulation, and Wall Street succeeded in getting deregulation. Frank Partnoy calculated for me that in 1980, 98 percent of financial assets traded in our economy were traded subject to the normal rules of transparency, anti-fraud requirements, basic exchange-based rules of the New Deal. By 2008, 90 percent of the assets traded were traded invisibly because they were not subject to any of these basic requirements of transparency and anti-fraud exchange-based obligations.

As I noted a few weeks ago, every discussion about the economic crash of 2007-2009, which was touched off by a massive financial crisis, should begin with the striking fact that there were no serious financial crises in the US between the New Deal and the beginning of the Reagan administration. This was no accident. During the the 1930s a remarkably intelligent set of regulations was enacted to cover banking and the rest of the financial sector, and it worked.

Over time, new types of financial activities developed that evaded or circumvented this regulatory framework, but the system was not revised and extended to cover them. Instead, starting in the 1980s, that whole framework of financial regulation was increasingly dismantled—not sensibly updated and adapted to new conditions, but heedlessly dismantled—in a process that combined free-market-fundamentalist ideological illusions with substantial amounts of irresponsibility, plutocratic muscle, political corruption, and simple greed.

At the same time, in a vicious cycle of mutually reinforcing processes, the financial sector—including a whole "shadow banking system"—metastasized out of control and swallowed up an ever-larger share of the economy. The overflowing funds, increasing political clout, and ideological prestige of the financial system were used, in turn, to promote further deregulation. And it so happens that during the same period, starting in the 1980s, we have once again experienced recurrent financial crises (and massive bailouts), escalating most recently into the great financial crash of 2007-2009 from whose consequences we are still recovering.

(For one very informative picture of how this all worked, by the way, I recommend watching Charles Ferguson's excellent documentary film "Inside Job", a guide for the perplexed which, among other things, does an impressive job of explaining esoteric financial arrangements like securitization, credit default swaps, and collateralized debt obligations in clear and comprehensible ways. If you want to start with a brief but illuminating video clip, Elizabeth Warren boils the story down to its essentials here.)

So what happened next? Lessig continues:

But the really astonishing thing is that after 2008, after we suffered the biggest collapse since the Depression, after every independent analyst had said there was a link between the structure of deregulation and the collapse, after the dean of deregulation—Alan Greenspan—confessed he made a mistake in assuming that the self-interest of the banks would lead them to behave virtuously rather than behave in a way that would drive to their maximum profit, after all of that, even then, Wall Street was able to blackmail the Democrats and the Republicans into handing them essentially a “Get Out of Jail Free” card and effect no fundamental change in the architecture of our financial system. That is, frankly, terrifying.

That formulation is a little too generous to the Republicans, since on the whole they should be seen as perpetrators more than victims. (Along with a lot of Democrats, of course—though it's wrong to simply impute moral equivalence in these matters to the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.) But it's true that Republican politicians have also been caught in a self-reinforcing system that's increasingly hard to break out of even if one wants to. And yes, it is terrifying.

Meanwhile, anyone who gets their information about the current Great Recession, and about the political economy of the United States more generally, from sources like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the Republican presidential campaign is presented with an alternate universe in which Wall Street and financial deregulation had nothing to do with precipitating the crash. Instead, the fault lay entirely with quasi-governmental institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and with the consequences of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (which supposedly forced banks to issue sub-prime mortgages to poor people and minorities). This nonsense was recently summed up, in truly astounding statement that might seem to vindicate the crudest versions of a Marxist theory of class-bound ideology, by none other than New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg:

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress, who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp [....] But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody.

I happen to know some intelligent, serious, and well-informed people who have been taken in by this propaganda, and like most propaganda it does contain some grains of truth, but overall it's just a fable. (For a patient explanation of some of the reasons why, see here.) However, this nonsense is far from being harmless, since as long as the real sources of the problem are ignored or obscured or distorted out of recognition, it will be hard to generate the political will to do anything constructive about them.

What we really need is a new New Deal, updated for the conditions of the early 21st century. I think some of Obama's supporters hoped he would deliver this, but obviously he hasn't (and probably never intended to). And prospects for the foreseeable future are not promising. But the first step is to start facing reality.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. Lessig's new book sounds as though it's worth reading, too. I was struck by several other perceptive passages in his interview, including this one:

The actual activity of fundraising is terrible and nobody really likes it. And it would be kind of comical, if it weren't so tragic, to see them running from Capitol Hill to their little cubby hole with their headsets dialing people they’ve never even met and asking them to give money. It’s really just grotesque.

But the other part about it is the way in which it infects what we imagine a Congress would be there for. If you started in 1794 and looked at our Congress, and compared it to the House of Commons, the two would look pretty much the same—you have people sitting in a room for five or six hours a day while they're in session, debating with each other, arguing about the ideas. Not necessarily that it’s the greatest of the arguments but they’re trying to do what you imagine a deliberative body would do—deliberate. Jump ahead to today, the House of Commons doesn’t look that much different, you still have sessions where everybody’s sitting there and debating, and they have question time where there’s real activity. But switch to C-SPAN covering the U.S. Congress and it’s a completely different picture. You can’t see it, because they don’t allow the camera to pan around, but the hall is empty, people coming to speak just to C-SPAN—they’re not speaking to each other—all of the activity of negotiation and deliberation is done outside the chamber; there’s no deliberation, so you just have to ask, “Why did we create a Congress?” The framers didn’t sit down and set up a Congress so they could imagine these 535 independent contractors all arbitraging fundraising opportunities. If that’s what the institution is, then let’s just shut it down.

Whose motto is “In God We Trust”? — History & mythology

2011-11-18T14:52:00.013-05:00

One of the more interesting aspects of American exceptionalism has involved the complex and distinctive forms that the interplay between religion and republicanism has taken in the history and politics of the United States. (For some previous discussions, see Religion & republicanism in American political culture, George Washington's Letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, A Muslim in Congress & the Spirit of the US Constitution, and "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" - Some historical perspective on pastors and Presidential candidates.)

A usefully informative piece by the historian Thomas A. Foster, cross-posted at Dissent and at the History News Network, nicely captures one strand in that history. Read the whole thing, but here are some highlights:

Last week [JW: this was posted on November 10, 2011] Congress voted to reaffirm that the national motto of the United States is “In God We Trust.” Representative Randy Forbes (R-VA) introduced the measure and argued that we would be following “our predecessors” by declaring a national trust in God. Last year he and the Congressional Prayer Caucus had criticized President Obama when he “falsely proclaimed” in a speech in Jakarta that “E Pluribus Unum” is the national motto.

The conservatives who criticized Obama and who claim the mantle of the founding fathers are mistaken on both counts. Although “In God We Trust” is the official motto, “E Pluribus Unum” has long been acknowledged as a de facto national motto. After all, it is on the Great Seal of the United States, which was adopted in 1782. Moreover, in the 1770s and ’80s Congress opposed a theistic motto for the nation, and many of the founders worked hard to prevent one from being established.

In July 1776, almost immediately after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were tasked with designing a seal and motto for the new nation. [....] It would take years and several more committees before Congress would approve the final design, still in use today, of an American bald eagle clutching thirteen arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other.

Only the motto “E Pluribus Unum” (“from many, one”) survived the committee in which Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin had served. All had agreed on that motto from the beginning [JW: while also considering various alternatives, which were dropped along the way].

The current motto, “In God We Trust,” was developed by a later generation. It was used on some coinage at the height of religious fervor during the upheaval of the Civil War. It was made the official national motto in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, to signal opposition to the feared secularizing ideology of communism. [JW: The phrase "under God" was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance around the same time.]

In other words, “In God We Trust” is a legacy of founders, but not the founders of the nation. As the official national motto, it is a legacy of the founders of modern American conservatism—a legacy reaffirmed by the current Congress.

I will opt for the aspirational "E Pluribus Unum", of course.

—Jeff Weintraub

Ballots no, bullets yes

2011-11-16T23:24:00.006-05:00

According to an article in last Sunday's New York Times:

Under federal law, people with felony convictions forfeit their right to bear arms. Yet every year, thousands of felons across the country have those rights reinstated, often with little or no review. In several states, they include people convicted of violent crimes, including first-degree murder and manslaughter, an examination by The New York Times has found.

While previously a small number of felons were able to reclaim their gun rights, the process became commonplace in many states in the late 1980s, after Congress started allowing state laws to dictate these reinstatements — part of an overhaul of federal gun laws orchestrated by the National Rifle Association. The restoration movement has gathered force in recent years, as gun rights advocates have sought to capitalize on the 2008 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

This gradual pulling back of what many Americans have unquestioningly assumed was a blanket prohibition has drawn relatively little public notice. Indeed, state law enforcement agencies have scant information, if any, on which felons are getting their gun rights back, let alone how many have gone on to commit new crimes.

While many states continue to make it very difficult for felons to get their gun rights back — and federal felons are out of luck without a presidential pardon — many other jurisdictions are far more lenient, The Times found. In some, restoration is automatic for nonviolent felons as soon as they complete their sentences. In others, the decision is left up to judges, but the standards are generally vague, the process often perfunctory. In some states, even violent felons face a relatively low bar, with no waiting period before they can apply. [....]

Even some felons who have regained their firearms rights say the process needs to be more rigorous.

“It’s kind of spooky, isn’t it?” said Beau Krueger, who has two assaults on his record and got his gun rights back last year in Minnesota after only a brief hearing, in which local prosecutors did not even participate. “We could have all kinds of crazy hoodlums out here with guns that shouldn’t have guns.” [....]

Is this nuts? Not necessarily. Kelly Kleiman (at The Reality-Based Community) finds the logic here:

Well, this makes sense–if we make it nearly impossible for felons to regain their right to vote [JW: see here], they’ll surely want to regain their right to fire weapons instead.

—Jeff Weintraub

Spain's stolen babies – More legacies of Franco & the Catholic Church come to light

2011-11-16T16:27:00.008-05:00

Another reminder of the massive crimes of the twentieth century and their lingering after-effects. According to a BBC report:

Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s.

This is startling. These baby-stealings began during the Franco dictatorship of 1936-1975, and represented one aspect of the long-time alliance between Francoism and the Catholic Church. But that part of the story is not surprising. (Nor is it unique. Kidnapped babies were also a specialty of the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983, though on a much smaller scale than in Franco's Spain—and in the Argentine case, as far as I know, the Church didn't play any significant institutional role.) What is startling is that these practices may have continued after the end of the Franco regime.

Less surprising, I'm afraid, is the involvement of the Catholic Church:

The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain's social services including hospitals, schools and children's homes.

Some highlights are below. Or you can read the whole thing (including two video clips.

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
BBC News
October 18, 2011
Spain's stolen babies and the families who lived a lie
By Katya Adler

Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s. [....]

In 1971 Manoli [Pagador], who was 23 at the time and not long married, gave birth to what she was told was a healthy baby boy, but he was immediately taken away for what were called routine tests.

Nine interminable hours passed. "Then, a nun, who was also a nurse, coldly informed me that my baby had died," she says.

They would not let her have her son's body, nor would they tell her when the funeral would be.

Did she not think to question the hospital staff?

"Doctors, nuns?" she says, almost in horror. "I couldn't accuse them of lying. This was Franco's Spain. A dictatorship. Even now we Spaniards tend not to question authority."

The scale of the baby trafficking was unknown until this year, when two men - Antonio Barroso and Juan Luis Moreno, childhood friends from a seaside town near Barcelona - discovered that they had been bought from a nun. Their parents weren't their real parents, and their life had been built on a lie.

Juan Luis Moreno discovered the truth when the man he had been brought to call "father" was on his deathbed. "He said, 'I bought you from a priest in Zaragoza'. He said that Antonio had been bought as well."

The pair were hurt and angry. They say they felt like two dogs that had been bought at a pet shop. An adoption lawyer they turned to for advice said he came across cases like theirs all the time.

The pair went to the press and suddenly the story was everywhere. Mothers began to come forward across Spain with disturbingly similar stories. [....]

After months of requests from the BBC, the Spanish government finally put forward Angel Nunez from the justice ministry to talk to me about Spain's stolen children.

Asked if babies were stolen, Mr Nunez replied: "Without a doubt".

"How many?" I asked.

"I don't dare to come up with figures," he answered carefully. "But from the volume of official investigations I dare to say there were many."

Lawyers believe that up to 300,000 babies were taken.

[JW: I have to say that this mind-boggling figure strikes me as implausibly large, even if one takes into account the huge numbers of people imprisoned and executed during and after the Civil War, many of whom would have left orphans behind or, if they survived, could have lost their children while imprisoned. But what do I know? And even much lower figures would be horrifying.]

The practice of removing children from parents deemed "undesirable" and placing them with "approved" families, began in the 1930s under the dictator General Francisco Franco.

At that time, the motivation may have been ideological. But years later, it seemed to change - babies began to be taken from parents considered morally - or economically - deficient. It became a money-spinner, too.

The scandal is closely linked to the Catholic Church, which under Franco assumed a prominent role in Spain's social services including hospitals, schools and children's homes.

Nuns and priests compiled waiting lists of would-be adoptive parents, while doctors were said to have lied to mothers about the fate of their children.

The name of one doctor, Dr Eduardo Vela, has come up in a number of victim investigations. [....]

In 1981, Civil Registry sources indicate that 70% of births at Dr Vela's San Ramon clinic in Madrid were registered as "mother unknown".

Dr Vela stands accused of telling women their babies had died when they had not and handing over those newborn children to other couples for cash. [....]

Babies' graves have been dug up across the country for DNA-testing. Some have revealed nothing but a pile of stones, while others have contained adult remains. [....]

"Can You Support Israel Without Supporting Netanyahu?" – Jeffrey Goldberg gives the obviously correct answer

2011-11-16T09:53:00.005-05:00

One advantage of blog posts, in contrast to most articles and opinion pieces in newspapers and newsmagazines, is that the titles or headlines are composed by the writer and not by an editor or sub-editor (who may or may not fully grasp the point).

A discussion posted today by Jeffrey Goldberg is titled, straightforwardly, "Can You Support Israel Without Supporting Netanyahu?". For some time now, John Rentoul has been running a nice series of "Questions to Which the Answer is No". Goldberg's heading makes me wonder whether there shouldn't also be a series of "Questions to Which the Answer is Obviously Yes".

And is there any truth to the charge, made by some people both in the US and in Israel, that Obama and his administration have shown themselves to be hostile towards Israel? Here we are back in the territory of Questions to Which the Answer is No.

Goldberg, who is usually right about most things, is right on both these matters in his post—and some others as well. So just read the whole thing (below).

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Jeffrey Goldberg
November 16, 2011
Can You Support Israel Without Supporting Netanyahu?

In response to my Bloomberg View column on the potential consequences of the brittle relationship between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, Jennifer Rubin writes in The Washington Post:

It's time for pro-Israel liberals to be honest: This president's animus toward the Jewish state is so evident that only a foolish prime minister would trust him with the survival of the Jewish state. And Netanyahu is no fool. Surely Goldberg could concede both these points?

Surely Goldberg will not concede both these points. Rubin, like many of her colleagues to my right, believes that Netanyahu is the living embodiment of the State of Israel. Her formula: If you dislike Netanyahu, you dislike Israel. This is absurd. Barack Obama has shown zero animus to the state of Israel or to the idea of Israel. In word and in deed, he has been in Israel's corner; he has spoken eloquently in defense of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, and he has provided it with unparalleled defense support.

Obama obviously disagrees with some of the polices of the current Israeli government [JW: and so should any intelligent supporter of Israel, in my humble opinion], and he doesn't seem to like the prime minister on a personal level. But this hasn't seemed to matter, so far. He and his administration have risen to Israel's defense repeatedly, most recently at the United Nations (just ask Susan Rice, his ambassador to the UN, how much time she spends batting back viciously anti-Israel resolutions). And there is no proof at all to suggest that he would not aid Israel in its national defense because he finds its current leader tendentious.

Obama, like the majority of Americans, is broadly sympathetic to Israel. On the question of Iran, I believe that Obama is trying to stop the mullahs from developing nuclear weapons, and I believe he would contemplate the use of force if he believes this to be in America's national interest -- and America's national interest in this case includes the defense of its Middle East allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia, most notably. [JW: On this point, I am less sure than Goldberg ... who is pretty conflicted himself on the whole issue.] Do I think this is probable? No. But it is certainly plausible. Obama has made it clear that he wants to stop Iran, and there is nothing in his record to suggest that these are empty words.

I also believe, however, that the lack of trust between Obama and Netanyahu is potentially harmful to both countries (particularly on an issue as dicey as Iran) but unlike Rubin, I believe it is mainly up to the junior partner (defense aid flows in only one direction here) to work harder to repair the relationship.

Herman Cain blows it big-time

2011-11-14T22:30:00.006-05:00

... or, is this Herman Cain's Rick Perry moment?

Via Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, I just happened to see this video clip from a Herman Cain interview which Sullivan is right to call simply "amazing". Asked about Libya, Cain Draws A Blank:

The Daily Dish post includes a roundup of assorted reactions. Here are some of them.

Dan Drezner:

There's a mercy rule in Little League, and I'm applying it here -- unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there's no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic.

Jonathan Chait:

Cain was operating on four hours sleep, his campaign tells Chuck Todd. I have been on four hours sleep before. It has not prevented me from recalling the general outline of recently concluded American military interventions.

Conor Friesdorf:

Like Rick Perry's inability to remember one of the three federal agencies he would eliminate, the moment must be seen to be believed -- do watch above, no description is adequate -- and is damaging not because presidential candidates must know small details like the leader of Uzbekistan, but because Cain clearly hasn't thought at all about a war his country was fighting while he ran for president. Presumably he was briefed on it prior to Saturday's foreign policy debate. [....] The man is not a quick study.

And from the far right corner, Michelle Malkin!:

Sorry, Cain fans. Tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. But like Rick Perry, Herman Cain is just not ready for prime time. The real Cain scandal: He can barely form a coherent thought on Libya when put on the spot and garbles collective bargaining 101 facts. [....] Cain makes Rick Perry look like a Mensa president.

Well, let's see whether any of this actually cuts into Cain's support in the Republican primary electorate. As I've noted before, the whole spectacle of this Republican nomination contest would be funny if its potential implications weren't so terrifying. Stay tuned ...

—Jeff Weintraub

Herman Cain & Ron Paul on torture

2011-11-14T11:12:00.005-05:00

I don't feel I have either the time or the inclination to keep watching the seemingly endless series of televised "debates" between the Republican presidential candidates, so I rely on news reports and on trustworthy analysts like Fred Kaplan ("If you like watching something scary, you would have liked Saturday's Republican presidential debate about foreign policy.") and Jonathan Turley. And even if I were watching them, I wouldn't feel moved to try to comment on them in detail. But one set of exchanges from the latest Republican debate does seem worth highlighting.

The candidates were asked whether the US should resume the Bush/Cheney policy of torturing suspected terrorists. Almost all of them said yes with alacrity, but a few of the answers were more bizarre and convoluted than the others.

Herman Cain is opposed to torture, period ... except that he isn't, exactly:

Herman Cain: I believe that following the procedures that have been established by our military, I do not agree with torture, period. However, I will trust the judgment of our military leaders to determine what is torture and what is not torture. That is the critical consideration.

Moderator: Mr. Cain, of course you’re familiar with the long-running debate we’ve had about whether waterboarding constitutes torture [....] In the last campaign, Republican nominee John McCain and Barack Obama agreed that it was torture and should not be allowed legally and that the Army Field Manual should be the methodology used to interrogate enemy combatants. Do you agree with that or do you disagree, sir?

Herman Cain: I agree that it was an enhanced interrogation technique.

Moderator: And then you would support it at present. You would return to that policy.

Herman Cain: Yes, I would return to that policy. I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique.

Then there's Ron Paul. I happen to consider consider Ron Paul a dangerous crackpot and a poisonously reactionary political troglodyte. I don't share the view, unfortunately too widespread, that he should be treated with sympathetic indulgence merely because his chances of actually becoming President are negligible. However, one should give credit where credit is due. His answer to that question about torture was on-target and commendably straightforward:

Ron Paul: Well, waterboarding is torture. And– and many other– it’s ill– it’s illegal under international law and under our law. It’s also immoral. The– and it’s also very impractical. There’s no evidence that you really get reliable evidence. Why would you accept the position of torturing 100 people because you know one person might have information? And that’s what you do when you accept the principle of a– of– of– of torture. I think it’s– I think it’s uncivilized and prac– and has no practical advantages and is really un-American to accept on principle that we will torture people that we capture.”

Fred Kaplan sums it up:

Only Paul and Huntsman spoke up for the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual on interrogation. Huntsman noted with a grave expression: “This country has values. I’ve lived overseas four times.… We diminish our standing in the world when we engage in torture. Waterboarding is torture.”

Gingrich wasn’t asked the torture question, but he did say that the nation needs to throw out all the CIA reforms that the Church Committee passed in the 1970s.

Romney wasn’t asked the question (too bad) [....]

By the way, Fred Kaplan's roundup of this debate is worth reading in full. And it's hard to disagree with his overall impression:

God help us if any of these jokers makes it into the White House.

=> And speaking of giving credit where credit is due, here are two examples of John McCain talking about torture and US policy, earlier this year ...

... and as part of a wider conversation in in 2009 ...

One can agree or disagree with McCain on various other issues that come up in these two discussions. But not, in my opinion, on these central points: "Waterboarding is torture". And a policy of torturing prisoners violates the Geneva Convention, US law, elementary decency, America's highest values and traditions, and our genuine national interests.

—Jeff Weintraub

The word from Gaza – Killing Jews is "an act of worship"

2011-11-14T08:55:00.019-05:00

To quote the complete sentence:

Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship, through which we come closer to you.

So why dwell on the negative (as my mother used to say to me sometimes when I was younger)? In a way, this is a boring dog-bites-man story, since in certain parts of the world this kind of rhetoric is routine, not exceptional. But I think it's useful to be reminded of that fact from time to time. Of course, I know some people believe that murderous anti-semitism is no big deal, or at most an "understandable" reaction. I don't feel that way.

Here is a video clip of excerpts from a rally in Gaza, taken from a broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV, the official Hamas-run TV station (via MEMRI). A transcript is below, but I recommend watching the video itself to get the full flavor.

Incidentally, if you listen to the video, you won't have to understand Arabic to know that when the rally organizer thanks God for making "our killing of Jews an act of worship" and promises to "harvest the skulls of Jews", the word he uses is indeed "Jews" ("Yahud") not "Zionists". Yes, he does threaten "Zionists" too, and promises to "uproot" and expel them from Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and the rest of a country whose name he won't utter, Israel. I expect some people will seize on that to try to pretend that this speech is neither murderous nor anti-semitic, but such people are beyond the reach of argument or evidence anyway.

(Thanks to Mick Hartley for the tip.)

—Jeff Weintraub

------------------------------------------------
Islamic Militants in Gaza: Allah's Teachings Are the Fire with Which "We Harvest the Skulls of the Jews"; "We Move Closer to Allah through Blood, Body Parts, and Martyrs"

Following are excerpts from statements made at a rally of the Palestinian Al-Ahrar movement in Gaza, a pro-Hamas group that split from Fatah, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on November 3, 2011:

Rally organizer: Praise be to you, our Lord. You have made our killing of the Jews an act of worship, through which we come closer to you. [....]

Allah's prayers upon you, our beloved Prophet [Muhammad]. You have made your teachings into constitutions for us – the light with which we dissipate the darkness of the occupation, and the fire with which we harvest the skulls of the Jews. [....]

Yes, our beloved brothers, even though the entire world moves closer to Allah through fasting, through hunger, and through tears, we are a people that moves closer to Allah through blood, through body parts, and through martyrs. [....]

Oh sons of Palestine, oh sons of the Gaza Strip, oh mujahideen – wage Jihad, wreak destruction, blow up and harvest the heads of the Zionists. Words are useless by now. The lie of peace is gone. Only weapons are of any use – the path of [recently killed] Yousuf and Ali, the path of martyrdom and Jihad. Only our wounds talk on our behalf. We speak nothing but the language of struggle, of Jihad, or rockets, of bombs, of cannons and of martyrdom-seekers. This is the language in which we talk and negotiate with the Zionist enemy. [....]

We say to the Zionists: Like a bad seed, we shall uproot you from our land, so that it can blossom in the light of the everlasting sun of our Jihad, and of our invincible religion. Jerusalem is not yours – get out of it! Haifa is not yours – get out of it! Tel Aviv is not yours – get out of it! Oh Zionists, get out before we expel you. these are the words of the mujahideen. [....]

Mitt Romney and the new American capitalism

2011-11-13T14:59:00.012-05:00

It's by no means a done deal, but it looks increasingly plausible that Mitt Romney will wind up becoming the Republican presidential candidate in 2012. And even those of us who would vote against him should probably hope that he does get the nomination, since he is the only one in the current crop of Republican candidates who isn't an out-and-out loon. (I am overlooking John Huntsman, who is very right-wing but who nevertheless seems relatively sane, because his chances of winning the nomination are so minuscule, and he has no committed base of minority support like Ron Paul.) So we need to get a clearer sense of who Romney is, what his record has been, and what he really represents.

=> For a start, here is one of the central themes running through an interesting and, on the whole, not unsympathetic profile of Romney that Benjamin Wallace-Wells did for New York Magazine, "The Romney Economy":

The political genuflection to businessmen is so gauzy and generic that praise for a candidate’s private-sector acumen can often sound phony. But Mitt Romney is the real thing. He was, by any measure, an astonishingly successful businessman, one who spent his career explaining how business might operate better, and who leveraged his own mind into a personal fortune worth as much as $250 million. But much more significantly, Romney was also a business revolutionary. Our economy went through a remarkable shift during the eighties as Wall Street reclaimed control of American business and sought to remake it in its own image. Romney developed one of the tools that made this possible, pioneering the use of takeovers to change the way a business functioned, remaking it in the name of efficiency. “Whatever you think of his politics, you have to give him credit,” says Steven Kaplan, a professor of finance and entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. “He came up with a model that was very successful and very innovative and that now everybody uses.”

The protests going on at Zuccotti Park now have raised the question of whether that transition was worth it. What emerged from that long decade of change was a system that is more productive, nimble, and efficient than the one it replaced; it is also less equal, less stable, and more brutal. These evolutions were not inevitable. They were the result, in part, of particular innovations developed by a few businessmen beginning a quarter century ago. Now one of them has a good chance of becoming president.

Romney made most of his money as CEO of Bain Capital.

“These Bain Capital guys,” says Neil Fligstein, an economics-sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “were agents of the shareholder value revolution.” By the mid-nineties, The Business Roundtable had changed its definition of the role of a company, winnowing a broad set of responsibilities down to a single one: increasing shareholder value. [....]

It’s difficult to track the fallout of any one private-equity firm’s work, but scholars have been able to look at the consequences of the industry as a whole. These studies have consistently found that private-equity takeovers improve productivity and shed jobs. But one interesting nineties study, by two academics, Don Siegel at SUNY Stony Brook and Frank Lichtenberg at Columbia, found something surprising: White-collar workers, for the first time, were more vulnerable than blue-collar workers. “Part of what the private-equity firms were doing was replacing office workers with information technology—that’s where they were getting some of their gains,” says Siegel, now the dean of the University of Albany’s business school.

Here, too, private equity seemed to provide an early warning of broader changes. In three years during the early nineties, the Princeton economist Henry Farber has found, roughly 10 percent of American white-collar male managers lost their jobs. For the first time, according to data collected through the General Social Survey, white-collar workers were nearly as worried about losing their jobs as blue-collar workers. Those white-collar workers who kept their jobs worked harder, and the compensation that had once been spread through the broader middle ranks of corporations now collected at the top. In 1980, a CEO had earned about 35 times the wages of an average worker; by 1990, it was about 80; and by 2000, it was about 300. The portion of America’s gross national product that ended up in the hands of workers declined by more than 10 percent between 1979 and 1996; the portion that went to investors rose by a similar amount. “What you end up with is a choice between a bigger cake less equally split and a smaller cake equally split,” says Bloom, the Stanford economist. “But that’s a social question.”

Yes, that is "a social question". But it's not absolutely clear that we actually wound up with "a bigger cake" than would otherwise have been the case. Yes, the US economy grew quite a bit between 1980 and the present. But the overall cake grew at a significantly faster rate during the quarter-century after World War II (and not just in the US). Granted, such comparisons are tricky. But it's possible, at least, that as a society we actually wound up with a smaller cake less evenly split. Be that as it may ...

Economists believe there was a clear connection between the labor-market changes in the early nineties and the great profits that soon followed. “Could we have had the productivity boom without displacement? My answer would be no,” says Frank Levy, an MIT economist.

The trouble, Levy believes, was that this new shareholder-value-driven system had no built-in mechanism of regulation, and its incentives geared CEOs toward shortsightedness and recklessness. [....] If you trace the public controversies over Bain Capital over time, you can see how the obsession over shareholder value and efficiency proved not just inequitable but destabilizing. [....]

=>An article in Saturday's New York Times looks back at one of those controversial cases, and in the process helps to flesh out the picture. Some highlights:

By the green-hued yardsticks of Wall Street, the 1990s buyout of an Illinois medical company by Mitt Romney’s private equity firm was a spectacular success.

Mr. Romney’s company, Bain Capital, sent in a team of 10 turnaround experts from Boston to ferret out waste, motivate executives and study untapped markets.

By the time the Harvard M.B.A.’s from Bain were finished, sales at the medical company, Dade International, had more than doubled. The business acquired two of its rivals. And Mr. Romney’s firm collected $242 million, a return eight times its investment.

But an examination of the Dade deal shows the unintended human costs and messy financial consequences behind the brand of capitalism that Mr. Romney practiced for 15 years.

At Bain Capital’s direction, Dade quadrupled the money it owed creditors and vendors. It took steps that propelled the business toward bankruptcy. And in waves of layoffs, it cut loose 1,700 workers in the United States, including Brian and Christine Shoemaker, who lost their jobs at a plant in Westwood, Mass. Staggered, Mr. Shoemaker wondered, “How can the bean counters just come in here and say, Hey, it’s over?” [....]

Bain and a small group of investors bought Dade in 1994 with mostly borrowed money, limiting their risk. They extracted cash from the company at almost every turn — paying themselves nearly $100 million in fees, first for buying the company and then for helping to run it. Later, just after Mr. Romney stepped down from his role, Bain took $242 million out of the business in a transaction that, according to bankruptcy documents and several former Dade officials, weakened the company.

Even some people who benefited from that payday and found it reasonable at the time now question it. “You would have to say, looking back, that it was too large, because it pushed us into bankruptcy,” said Robert W. Brightfelt, a former Dade president who collected more than $1 million. [....]

Dade emerged from bankruptcy two months later and the stock soon began trading publicly.

Over the next four years, its revenues and share price surged, and in 2007, Siemens, the German conglomerate, paid $7 billion to buy Dade Behring. The Dade name disappeared, but the company survived.

Bain’s strategy, as painful as it was with plant closings and layoffs, had ultimately worked, executives said. The bankruptcy “does muddy the story,” said Mr. Wolsey-Paige, the former Dade executive. “Over all,” he said, “it was very positive.”

I suppose that depends, in part, on your perspective.

As Schumpeter famously pointed out a long time ago, a "perennial gale of creative destruction" is inseparable from the core dynamics of capitalism as a socio-economic system, so it would be unrealistic to imagine that, even in the best-case scenarios, capitalism can ever deliver gain without some pain. (Schumpeter knew that Marx had already made essentially the same point, and made it quite eloquently; but, unlike Marx, Schumpeter loved capitalism.) But that's precisely why capitalism can't be allowed to simply operate unhindered, but always has to be contained, counterbalanced, regulated, and mitigated by other social, political, and cultural forces and institutions. The balance between creation and destruction doesn't automatically come out for the best, and the extent to which is does or doesn't is influenced by public policies and other socio-political factors. And the balance between who gets the gains and who suffers the pains should be, as the man said, "a social question" subject to public consideration, moral assessment, and democratic debate. We need to pay more attention to it.

Meanwhile, both of those pieces about Romney (here & here) are worth reading in full. Whatever one thinks of his record as a businessman and its implications, any claim that Romney has experience as a "job creator" should be taken with a grain of salt.

—Jeff Weintraub

"People Like Us" and the Ohio referendum (Jonathan Chait)

2011-11-13T12:21:00.007-05:00

Lots of Americans complain about "government spending" and "government programs", but which government programs do they actually dislike? Here's another shrewd observation from Jonathan Chait:

The conservative movement holds an ideological and generally principled opposition to government. [JW: I think "right-wing" is more accurate than "conservative" here, contrary to the peculiar & misleading terminology of American politics, but let's skip that for the moment.] Most Republican voters don’t share that. They oppose government programs that seem to benefit people other than themselves.

The most relevant piece of work here is a study by Donald Kinder and Cindy Kam, which identified ethnocentrism, or a favoritism for people you identify with racially, culturally, or otherwise, as a driving force of American public opinion. Among whites, ethnocentrism makes you more opposed to welfare and food stamps. That’s conservative, and obviously not very surprising. The surprising thing is that ethnocentric whites are more supportive of Social Security and Medicare. Those are programs for people like themselves.

Republicans successfully mobilized public opposition to health care reform by portraying it as an attempt to take health care away from people like you and give it to the undeserving "them." Conservatives deliriously interpreted this as a triumph of anti-government ideology asserting itself. But as Republicans discovered when they voted for a budget to slash Medicare, the public remains staunchly opposed to cutting programs for people like themselves. [....]

Cops, firefighters, teachers, nurses — people like us. Conservatives have yet to grasp that their successful attempts to rally opposition to government programs seen as benefiting the Other do not translate into opposition to the vast bulk of the government.

This is not simply a matter of individual selfishness (or, to put it more technically, of the "rational" calculation of purely individual self-interest). As Chait's discussion makes clear, the most crucial questions have to do with solidarity and collective identity. Who are "we" (for what purposes), and how do we draw the lines between "us" and "them"? How widely and how strongly does solidarity reach? These questions are always of central importance in politics, and especially for the politics of democratic citizenship.

Senate Bill 5 in Ohio was an attack on public employees' unions, but obviously a large proportion of those who voted to repeal it weren't public employees themselves, or even close relatives of public employees. A pervasive feature of the Republicans' long-term war on unions has been an effort to drive a wedge between private-sector and public-sector workers, to the detriment of both. Too often, that works. This time it didn't.

Solidarity forever!
Jeff Weintraub

What to do about low wages & decelerating job creation in the US? (Lane Kenworthy)

2011-11-13T09:39:00.004-05:00

Lane Kenworthy has an excellent piece in the Christian Science Monitor which he describes (elsewhere) as a "condensed version" of his current thinking on the subject. The way he sets up the problem is very nice, and worth quoting in full:

The Great Recession and its aftermath are at the forefront of Americans' concerns right now. But wages were in trouble long before the economic crisis hit in 2008. After rising steadily for a generation following World War II, the wages paid to Americans in the lower half of the earnings distribution have barely budged since the 1970s.

That isn't because the US economy has failed to grow. It's because growth of wages no longer tracks growth of the economy. [JW: In other words, if it was ever true that a rising tide necessarily and automatically lifted all boats, it's not true any more.] Economic growth and wage growth have become decoupled.

This is worrisome. Rising income, even more than the opportunity to go from rags to riches, is at the core of the American dream. And people who feel they are better off than before tend to be more generous, altruistic, and participatory. If wage stagnation continues, America risks heightened frustration, alienation, and selfishness.

Moreover, given that pay and incomes have been growing rapidly for those at the top, the country has experienced a sharp increase in polarization. At some point this could engender serious societal friction.

Actually, I would say that it already has, in various direct and indirect ways. But so far the widespread feelings of anxiety, insecurity, frustration, and anger have largely been deflected away from the very rich and the factors promoting this economic polarization onto other targets.

Maxing out on two-income households

According to one view, though, household living standards have been improving without wage growth, and they can continue to do so.

It's true that incomes in households with two adults have risen in spite of stagnant wages. But that's due largely to the steady increase in second earners. America is approaching the end of its ability to use rising household employment as a substitute for rising wages. And in any case this isn't a solution for single adults.

It's also true that during the past few decades, Americans have benefited from improvements in product quality and the invention of new gadgets – new medical technology, personal computers, cellphones, the Internet, MP3 players, e-readers, and so on. These enhance quality of life. Maybe this trend will continue, but it doesn't seem wise to assume it will. Nor would that be enough. iPhones are great, but owning one won't help pay a mortgage or college tuition.

In the 1990s and 2000s, borrowing helped to substitute for rising wages and household incomes. With home values appreciating, middle-class families could take on more and more debt in order to fund rising consumption. But for many, that option is now foreclosed.

That last point should be underlined. The past several decades have been marked by dramatically increasing income inequality and stagnating wages for most of the population. It so happens that during the same period we have also seen exploding levels of individual and family debt. Pure coincidence? Unlikely. But the historical link between these different tendencies seems to be insufficiently appreciated.

A second view holds that wage stagnation actually is healthy, because low wages spur job creation. This seems plausible in the abstract; low wages should make it more attractive for employers to hire. Is it true in practice?

If it's correct, the lack of wage growth over the past three decades should have resulted in increasingly strong job growth. But that hasn't happened. The rate of employment growth has slowed in each successive business cycle from the 1980s to the 1990s to the 2000s. Job growth was especially lackluster during the 2000-07 business cycle; the country's employment rate did not increase at all.

Wage growth unlikely to return

A third approach is to hope that wage growth will return. Alas, I suspect that's unlikely. [....]

For the rest of that argument, along with some proposed solutions, see here. I'm not sure I am totally convinced, since I suspect (and hope) that the potential range of realistically viable solutions may be wider than Lane suggests. (More on that another time, perhaps.) But his analysis in this piece is, as usual, well informed, well argued, illuminating, and usefully thought-provoking ... and it's compact, too. So you ought to read it.

—Jeff Weintraub

Obituaries for humanitarian intervention may be premature (David Rieff vs. Norman Geras)

2011-11-11T14:55:00.016-05:00

There is an old saying to the effect that a cynic is often a disillusioned idealist. In this spirit, the humane but disillusioned David Rieff has for some time been a bitter critic of the whole idea of "humanitarian intervention" and the related principle of an international "responsibility to protect" victims of genocide and other mass atrocities. In 2007 (as Norman Geras reminds us), Rieff wrote an obituary for humanitarian intervention that seemed all too plausible at the time. The disastrous aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war, he argued, had discredited the idea "for at least a generation". Some highlights:

Whatever one thinks of him, in international affairs [Tony] Blair was a leader of consequence. Indeed, he can be plausibly described as being chiefly responsible for formulating and successfully propagating the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention." That idea captured the imagination of much of the elite of the developed world over the course of the 1990's, and provided the moral rationale for the principal western military interventions of the post-cold war period, from Bosnia to Iraq.

Given how catastrophic the invasion of Iraq has turned out to be, it is hard even to remember when interventions on moral grounds - whether to thwart a dictator, as in the case of the Balkan wars, or to put an end to anarchic cruelty, as in the case of British intervention in Sierra Leone - seemed like a great advance in international affairs. No longer would the powerful sit by idly while butchers like Slobodan Milosevic or Foday Sankoh slaughtered their own people.

It's worth interjecting a few brief remarks here. Many people seem to believe, like Rieff, that the idea of "interventions on moral grounds", with the limits that implies on absolute notions of state sovereignty, is a very recent innovation, dating from barely the day before yesterday. But as the work of Gary Bass, Chaim Kaufmann and others has demonstrated, this impression is incorrect. For better or worse, the origins of modern humanitarian intervention, both in principle and in practice, go back to the early 19th century. And 19th-century humanitarian interventionism played a major role in helping to produce, among other notable results, the independence of Greece and the suppression of the international slave trade. It may be a bad idea, but it's not quite as new as Rieff thinks.

Furthermore, even in terms of recent history, it strikes me as a bit of an overstatement to single out Tony Blair as having been "chiefly responsible" for "formulating and successfully propagating" this doctrine that Rieff finds so pernicious. But there's no question that he played a significant role, so we can leave that issue to one side.

Today, humanitarian intervention has become a dirty word for many of the same people who once believed in it. Only American neoconservatives, understandably grateful for his championing of the Iraq war and his ability to argue for it coherently and eloquently (unlike President Bush, who was and is unable to do either), are sorry to see Blair go.

That bit about "only American neoconservatives" is a standard cliché, but even when he wrote it, David Rieff himself must have known that his statement was, to say the least, overstated. It's clear that people in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, for example, also don't share Rieff's assessment of Tony Blair and of humanitarian intervention. But be that as it may ...

But what may be lost is how many people did believe.

Blair still does. In a recent interview, he replied to the question of the core of his foreign policy with two words: "liberal interventionism." The world may have moved on, chastened by the realisation that interveners, even when intervening in the name of human rights, can be as barbaric as tin pot dictators. But Blair, it seems, is not to be moved. [....]

Blair is the last interventionist. Neither his successor, Gordon Brown, nor George Bush's successor, whoever he or she turns out to be, will be able to mount another intervention similar to that in Kosovo, let alone Iraq. [....] By putting liberal interventionism at the heart of his foreign policy, Tony Blair has made it radioactive - a political non-starter for at least a generation.

=> Well, as Norm points out, "It turned out to be a very short generation." In the wake of the recent NATO-led intervention in Libya, which (so far) most Libyans and many westerners consider to have been pretty successful, that blanket prediction looks like a case of wishful thinking.

However, Rieff and others are now making the same kind of prediction about the unintended consequences of the Libyan intervention. Once again, Rieff argues (and/or hopes) that this experience has effectively discredited the doctrine of humanitarian intervention—though this time he sounds a bit less certain and less sweeping than he did in 2007:

At first glance, the intervention in Libya looks like a textbook case of how the new U.N. doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was supposed to work. The doctrine’s supporters had hoped that it would codify the obligations of outside powers to intervene — through nonmilitary means whenever possible, but with lethal force if necessary — when a tyrannical regime threatens to slaughter its own people. [....]

But a far more qualified reaction may be in order. For one thing, it’s unclear whether the fall of Qaddafi will usher in a better or democratic government in Libya; so far the revolutions of the Arab Spring have not been promising on that front. For another thing, unlike earlier versions of humanitarian intervention, R2P was about protecting civilians, and emphatically not about regime change. The Security Council resolutions that authorized an R2P-based intervention to protect Benghazi did not authorize outside powers to provide air support for the subsequent rebellion against Qaddafi. And it is almost certain that without that support he would not have been overthrown. [....]

As a result, everywhere outside Western Europe and North America, R2P is losing what little ethical credibility it ever commanded.[....] Clearly, no R2P-based, Libya-like interventions will get sanction from the U.N. in the foreseeable future.

One would never know it from all the victory talk in the West, but instead of strengthening R2P as a new global norm, the NATO intervention in Libya may well serve as its high water mark.

Perhaps. Rieff's analysis is worth reading, and it raises some issues worth considering. But I agree with Norman Geras that some key elements of his argument are questionable or misleading. And this new obituary for humanitarian intervention and R2P may, once again, turn out to be premature.

(That may depend, in part, on what actually happens in Libya now. But I also suspect that the next instance of full-scale genocide—which, alas, is bound to occur sometime—will revive feelings of discomfort about simply letting it happen.)

=> Meanwhile, I will just endorse Norm's skeptical response to Rieff's latest obituary. Among other things:

I have said often before on this blog, and will now say again, that protecting a people from the regime which rules over it sometimes requires dispatching the regime altogether, once it passes a certain level of criminality.

There is no inherent contradiction here—quite the contrary.

And I think Norman Geras is right to suggest that Rieff and others like him have (at best) only begun to face up to the moral costs of simply dismissing the principle of a "responsibility to protect":

Rieff shouldn't be so quick to write R2P off as a global norm while he has nothing better with which to replace it.

You can read the rest here.

—Jeff Weintraub

Next-day update: As a follow-up, here is a brief exchange with one correspondent, which I share with that person's permission.

Once again, you've put together an important and interesting issue. I understand David's doubts, though I worry that disillusion can spawn passivity. I haven't followed his work as closely as I should have, but what does he propose to do instead?

That's the right question. I can't pretend to have read everything David Rieff has written on this subject in the past decade or so, but I think I've read a fair amount of it (a typical statement is here). And I think Norman Geras's last point has him dead to rights. As far as I can tell, Rieff's generalized assault on "humanitarianism" in all its contemporary forms is purely negative, and he has not really offered any substantive alternative to inaction in the face of mass atrocity (along with strict adherence to Westphalian-style state sovereignty).

What makes that absence especially significant is that Rieff has been one of the most thoughtful and eloquent proponents of this futilitarian critique. The perspective informing his arguments seems to be fairly pure conservative pessimism, combined with a crudely reductionistic tendency to lump together all appeals to morality in international affairs and treat them as simply rhetorical fig-leafs for imperialism-as-usual. There are grains of truth in both those positions (more than grains, in some cases) ... but by itself this perspective is one-sided, distorting, and (in my opinion) morally unacceptable. The dilemmas are real and intractable, sure, but it seems to me that an approach like Rieff's just evades those dilemmas rather than constructively facing up to them.

The alleged "success" of financial deregulation and other right-wing fantasies examined (Paul Krugman)

2011-11-09T22:23:00.006-05:00

Some people, including not just Republican politicians but prominent right-wing economists, have been claiming for a while that policy changes originating in the so-called Reagan Revolution, including the dismantling of financial regulation, set in motion a sustained and unprecedented economic boom. For example, in 2009 Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, put it as follows:

Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It’s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth.

And many others, ranging from journalists and pundits to ordinary citizens, have come to accept this picture as accurate.

But the fact that anyone believes this is actually puzzling. Paul Krugman points out the obvious:

The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable.

(For a handy graph, see here.) The truth of that historical comparison is simply incontestable. One might try to find ways to explain it away, but the facts themselves are quite clear. So why do people who pretend otherwise ever get taken seriously?

Krugman ventures into a sociological analysis of hegemonic ideologies.

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

That's quite shrewd, and I think Krugman is on to something here. In this case, it really does appear that the dominant economic ideas have been those that fit not only the interests but the distinctive experience of the top 1%. At all events, this is an insightful and illuminating discussion. See below.

--Jeff Weintraub
==============================
New York Times (On-Line)
November 8, 2011, 11:33 a.m.
Boom for Whom?
By Paul Krugman

While I’m talking about inequality and the crisis, I realized recently that there’s another channel not usually talked about, via the misperception of success.

Let me start with a puzzle: why did faith in the wonders of financial deregulation persist so long?

After all, if you step back from the record, deregulation began producing disasters from early on. Early deregulatory moves helped bring on the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s; Garn-St. Germain produced the savings and loan debacle; freed-up capital flows produced the Asian crisis and LTCM; and now we have the great bust. So why were Very Serious People so convinced that it was a good thing?

Well, the answer from the usual suspects has always been that the era of deregulation was also an era of unprecedented economic growth. A while back I noted how Peter Wallison — one of the prime movers behind the Big Lie on the causes of the crisis — claimed that

Indeed, the modern era of rapid economic growth commenced after both Democratic and Republican presidents undertook to lift costly and stultifying New Deal regulations.

Similarly, Eugene Fama asserted that

Beginning in the early 1980s, the developed world and some big players in the developing world experienced a period of extraordinary growth. It’s reasonable to argue that in facilitating the flow of world savings to productive uses around the world, financial markets and financial institutions played a big role in this growth.

The point is that these are pure fantasies on the part of the right. The true age of spectacular growth in the United States and other advanced economies was the generation after World War II, with post-Reagan growth nowhere near comparable. So why do these people imagine otherwise?

And the answer, once you think about it, is obvious: growth for whom? There’s only one way in which the post-deregulation boom was exceptional, and that’s in terms of the growth in incomes at the top of the scale.

Here’s a comparison of the postwar boom with the deregulation alleged boom, using real average family income from the Census and real average income for the top 1 percent from Piketty and Saez:

If you’re looking at the average, the last generation is a poor shadow of the postwar boom. But if you’re talking about the 1 percent, wonderful things have happened.

No wonder then, that Very Serious People — who, after all, get to be considered Very Serious because the elite likes them — have retained faith in deregulation despite repeated disasters.

Rami Khouri calls for accountability, responsibility, and historical memory about Iraq

2011-11-09T16:28:00.009-05:00

In a column for the Beirut Daily Star, "Iraq Reminds Us Why Accountability Matters", the Palestinian-Jordanian-American journalist Rami Khouri correctly insists that nations, governments, and individuals should be held accountable for the results of their actions and should feel a sense of responsibility for them. He is also correct to say that doing this honestly and seriously requires putting such matters in historical perspective.

Rami Khouri is a generally thoughtful, intelligent, and humane writer. I agree with him that we need to keep things in historical perspective and avoid the temptations for moral and historical amnesia.

So what history does Khouri think we need to remember about Iraq? He was disturbed to read

a New York Times report from Baghdad quoting senior U.S. and Iraqi officials who expressed, "growing concern that Al-Qaeda’s offshoot here, which just a few years ago waged a debilitating insurgency that plunged the country into a civil war, is poised for a deadly resurgence. … U.S. and Iraqi analysts said Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia was shifting its tactics and strategies – like attacking Iraqi security forces in small squads – to exploit gaps left by the departing U.S. troops and to try to reignite sectarian violence."

What makes this so noteworthy is what was left unwritten in the news story, and is equally ignored in the mainstream of public discussion in the U.S. these days: Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia only came into its own and carried out its deadly attacks and its sectarian terrorism because the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 made it possible for it to do so.

There was no significant Al-Qaeda-style presence in Iraq before 2003. [Etc.]

That last point is quite true, of course.

Before 2003, Iraq was merely under the control of a genocidal fascist regime with a decades-long record of terrifying and sadistic repression, large-scale mass murder and ethnic cleansing, and repeated bouts of catastrophic military adventurism—a regime which, directly or indirectly, caused the deaths of far more Iraqis than the horrifying numbers who have died since 2003 (not to mention Iranians and Kuwaitis), and which almost certainly would have embarked on another genocidal bloodbath in Iraqi Kurdistan, just for starters, once the rapidly unraveling sanctions-&-containment system had collapsed. And a number of governments in the region and elsewhere, along with substantial portions of Arab and international public opinion, were helping Saddam Hussein and his regime undermine the sanctions-&-containment system and, when push came to shove, supported the option of leaving Iraqis under the control of this regime.

Curiously enough, Khouri’s piece mentions none of these things. But they strike me as adding up to an important part of the actual historical context, and the dilemmas posed by that context, in the period leading up to the 2003 Iraq war. (One might even say these things were “left unwritten” and “ignored” in Khouri's piece.)

Of course, none of that wipes away or excuses the spectacular incompetence and almost criminal irresponsibility with which the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld gang carried out the post-Saddam occupation and (alleged) reconstruction of Iraq, with consequences that helped produce great and continuing suffering. Responsibility and accountability for those need to be faced up to. But since Khouri is right to emphasize the dangers of a moral and historical perspective that is misleadingly selective and incomplete, I thought it couldn't hurt to round out the picture a bit. History, morality, and politics are all complicated and often tragic.

—Jeff Weintraub

Could Candidate Gingrich actually come back from the dead? (Jonathan Chait)

2011-11-09T14:50:00.005-05:00

The ongoing spectacle of the Republican nomination contest would be comical–if the prospect that one of these candidates might actually become President of the United States weren't so terrifying.

In polls of likely Republican primary voters, support for Mitt Romney has long been stuck at a maximum of about 25%, and it's clear that the one thing the other 75% or so agree on is that they strongly don't want Romney to be the Republican candidate. I suspect that a lot of those 25% (including, say, Chris Christie) support Romney only because they don't believe he actually means any of the things he's now saying to win the nomination. On the other hand, one of Romney's major weaknesses as a Republican primary candidate is precisely that many of the other 75% also don't believe anything he says. They think that under the surface–one can't say "deep down" because, rightly or wrongly, few people believe any longer that Romney has any deep core of beliefs or principles–Romney continues to be a crypto-"moderate" or, as hard-right Republicans say, a RINO (Republican in Name Only). We might have to hope that they're right.

So now, as Herman Cain's (ludicrous) candidacy seems to be going down in flames, who might emerge as the next Anyone-But-Romney front-runner? A recent PPP poll of Republican voters suggests that it might, incredibly enough, be Newt Gingrich:

[I]f Cain does eventually implode, Newt Gingrich is well positioned to become the new Republican front runner. He's running ahead of Romney in both Ohio and Mississippi, and tied with him in the Iowa district. Beyond that he is the second choice of Cain's supporters in all three of the places we polled over the weekend. [....]

Gingrich has had a massive improvement in his image over the last six months. [....] Newt is definitely rising and could really find himself in good shape if Cain's troubles continue.

What to make of this? As usual, Jonathan Chait nails it:

For a while now, the political press corps has been predicting the demise of Herman Cain, and further predicting that none other than Newt Gingrich would rise to take his place, just as Trump begat Bachmann, and Bachmann begat Perry, and Perry begat Cain. I dismissed the whole thing as too preposterous even for this Republican primary. Gingrich would appear to be disqualified on the hard-to-combine grounds of both being a left deviationist – here he is endorsing action to stop climate change with Nancy Pelosi; here he is savaging Paul Ryan’s budget – and of being such a right-wing loon the party couldn’t be mad enough to nominate him. (Here he is endorsing bizarre conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s father; many other examples could be found.) JW: Don't forget this one & this one.]

But now there is actual evidence that the Gingrich resurrection may be upon us, courtesy of a PPP poll [....]

I … I … I don’t even know what to say here. It has simply never occurred to me before today that there would be even the slightest chance of the Republican Party nominating Newt Gingrich – not even in the nineties, at the height of his powers, when such speculation was rampant. Parties don’t nominate people like that. You nominate a telegenic front man, not an erratic, overbearing, morally repulsive tub of goo like Gingrich.

That assessment of Gingrich is a bit too generous, but otherwise what Chait says makes good sense. I never took the prospect seriously either, even back in the mid-1990s, and certainly not in the past few years. But then what do I know?

Are there any actual Republican operatives, as opposed to hapless voting stiffs, who approve of this? Well, Former Bushie Jeffrey H. Anderson of the Weekly Standard is actually pining away for Newt [....]

Chait concludes:

It is probably time for me to stop making predictions of any kind about this race.

Probably wise. My very non-expert guess is that, in the end, Romney will hang on and come out ahead of Anyone-But-Romney for the Republican nomination, but anything could happen.

Hoping for the best (or less than the worst),
Jeff Weintraub

Referendum in Ohio: A landslide defeat for the Republican war on unions

2011-11-09T09:15:00.006-05:00

Yesterday I offered my opinion that if Ohio voters repealed the aggressive anti-union measures enacted by the Republican governor and legislature back in February, this would represent a welcome victory not only for the union movement but for democracy. On the other hand, a victory by the anti-union forces would be a bad outcome for Ohio and one more bad sign about the overall direction of American politics.

It turns out that, in Ohio at least, the Republican war on unions was dealt a major setback. From the New York Times:

A year after Republicans swept legislatures across the country, voters in Ohio delivered their verdict Tuesday on a centerpiece of the conservative legislative agenda, striking down a law that restricted public workers’ rights to bargain collectively.

The landslide vote to repeal the bill — 62 percent to 38 percent, according to preliminary results from Ohio’s secretary of state — was a slap to Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican who had championed the law as a tool for cities to cut costs. The bill passed in March on a wave of enthusiasm among Republicans fresh from victories. A similar bill also passed in Wisconsin. [....]

At a news conference Tuesday night, Mr. Kasich congratulated the winners and said he would assess the situation before proposing any new legislation. “It’s time to pause,” he said. “The people have spoken clearly.”

When asked about the people’s message, Mr. Kasich said, “They might have said it was too much too soon.”

We should be cautious about drawing overly sweeping general conclusions from this one outcome. In Ohio the Republicans overreached in a fairly extreme manner, as even Kasich now seems to recognize—for example, by attacking police and firefighters as well as the usual scapegoats like teachers and nurses, an error that cost them support among normally Republican voters. And they failed to drive a wedge between public-sector and private-sector workers, but instead seem to have frightened private-sector workers into solidarity with unionized public-sector workers. As Kyle Leighton reported in TPM yesterday, when a lopsided defeat for the Republicans was already looking probable:

[I]f Ohio Republicans were hoping for a death blow to the power of unions in a state with a strong labor history, they may have had the opposite effect. In interviews with TPM, Ohio Democratic party and union staffers said that the whole fight has essentially ignited party activism in the most important of swing states.

Also, the national labor movement went all-out to support this referendum campaign in Ohio, and it's not clear whether it could reproduce the intensity of this effort on a national scale. (It appears that in this Ohio referendum fight, the pro-union side even outspent the anti-union side—a pattern that obviously could never be reproduced on a national scale, since the funds available to business interests dwarf those available to unions.)

Nevertheless, this is a welcome and dramatic victory for the good guys. And, despite all the necessary caveats, it may well be a signal of larger trouble for the agenda of the Republican hard right. Let's hope so.

=> Incidentally, a referendum in Maine yesterday produced a small local defeat for another nation-wide right-wing campaign, the long-term Republican war on voting. To quote today's New York Times again:

Across the country, several other Republican-backed measures were also dealt setbacks, including a crackdown on voting rights in Maine.

For more details on the Maine referendum, see here.

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub

High stakes in today's referendum in Ohio

2011-11-08T12:25:00.007-05:00

One of the most significant, harmful, and pernicious developments in US politics over the past four decades has been the long-term collapse of the union movement. The reasons for that judgment go beyond the obvious but important facts that this process has been profoundly disempowering for many Americans and has, directly or indirectly, helped eliminate necessary counterweights to the the plutocratic forces in American politics. The consequences have also been damaging to American democracy for wider reasons of the sort emphasized, for example, by Tocqueville.

I don't mean to suggest that Tocqueville was especially a fan of unions. What I have in mind is Tocqueville's analysis of how a democratic political society works and of the factors that can threaten or eviscerate it. Tocqueville and others argue (convincingly in my view) that the viability and effectiveness of democratic self-government depends not only on laws and formal institutions, important as those are, but also on the existence and vitality of a broadly inclusive political culture of citizenship. A political culture of democratic citizenship is both expressed through and promoted by involvement in ongoing practices of association, cooperation, collective action, and active solidarity. On the other hand, a political culture of citizenship is undermined by tendencies toward social atomization, a narrowly exclusive focus on self-interested individualism, and the erosion of associational life. And it so happens that over the past several decades one factor that has powerfully contributed to such tendencies in American society has been the collapse of the labor movement.

This long-term decline of unions can be explained partly in terms of impersonal structural and cultural factors that are also at work in other western societies, and partly in terms of internal weaknesses and errors of the union movement itself. But that's only part of the picture. In the US, another crucial factor has been a relentless campaign of union-busting pursued ever since the 1960s by employers, right-wing ideologues and propagandists, (mostly Republican) politicians and bureaucrats, and a massive bloc of pro-business and/or doctrinaire pro-market federal judges appointed by a generation of Republican presidents. The agenda has been to undermine or eliminate the rights of workers, in both the private and public sectors, to form unions without risk of intimidation or retaliation and to bargain collectively.

This campaign has included changing laws and administrative regulations or, when that can't be done explicitly, rendering them ineffective in practice. (For example, in principle employers are not legally allowed to fire workers simply because they want to form a union, but in practice that supposed legal protection is increasingly a bad joke.) This whole process has been self-reinforcing, with the usual vicious circles of cause and effect, since the declining numbers of union members and the declining political clout of unions has increased the strength of anti-union forces and encouraged them to redouble their efforts.

Well, maybe they've overreached a bit. With luck, we may be about to see some signs of a backlash.

It is beginning to look as though today's referendum in Ohio may deal a major setback to this ongoing Republican/plutocratic war against the union movement, which has intensified in recent years. Since this assault against unions has had such a tremendously corrosive effect on political society and political culture in the US, a defeat for anti-union measures in Ohio would also, in my opinion, be a victory for democracy and democratic citizenship. (And one doesn't have to love all unions, or agree with all the policies they favor, to feel this way.) A victory for anti-union forces, on the other hand, would be ... unfortunate.

The stakes were captured nicely by David Firestone in an opinion piece in the New York Times Weekly Review this past weekend (November 5, 2011):

Republican state lawmakers in the Upper Midwest have been remarkably successful this year in stripping public employees of their bargaining rights, but that campaign could slam to a halt on Tuesday when Ohio voters get a chance to weigh in.

Unions and business groups have poured a huge amount of time and money into a referendum on whether to overturn Senate Bill 5, signed into law in March by Gov. John Kasich. The measure bans negotiations on health benefits for public employees, including police officers and firefighters, and makes it virtually impossible to bargain on staffing or to collect dues properly. The outcome will say a great deal about whether blue-collar anger at Republican policies is large enough to be felt at the ballot box, both this year and more importantly in 2012.

A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that it might be, showing that 57 percent of Ohio’s registered voters support repealing the Republican bill. The petition drive to get the referendum on the ballot drew 1.3 million signatures, the largest number in state history. (A state constitutional amendment that would block national health care reform from taking effect in Ohio is also on the ballot and may increase Republican turnout, but that issue hinges solely on a Supreme Court decision and is not a state matter.)

The level of political energy generated by the referendum is being closely watched because tamping down union power was at the heart of Republican efforts in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and several other states. Unions say that businesses are hoping to privatize public jobs in those states, but that the larger goal is to gut the public unions of their dues and thus their political power to oppose Republicans at the state and http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnational levels.

Democratic governors in New York and Connecticut have shown that it is perfectly possible to make substantial cuts in spending on salaries and pensions without killing unions. Republicans in the Midwest always wanted much more than that, and Tuesday will be the biggest test of whether they can achieve it.

So I'm hoping for the best.

[Next-day update: The good guys won decisively, 62%-38%.]

Yours for democratic citizenship,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. If you'd like to see an eloquent statement by Ronald Reagan insisting that "where free unions and collective bargaining is forbidden, freedom is lost", check out the video clip below. (As President, he later defended "the basic right [....] to form free trade unions and to strike".) Of course, he didn't really mean it, but what he said was eloquent and correct nevertheless.

A follow-up to New Labour and poverty reduction

2011-11-07T14:29:00.004-05:00

I got a fair-amount of e-mail in response to my recent post on New Labour and poverty reduction. One correspondent from Britain was the admirable Peter Ryley (who blogs at Fat Man on a Keyboard). Our brief e-mail exchange is posted below, with his permission.

--------------------
PR: The book is quoted as being about raising "the absolute living standards of the least well-off." Welcome though this was (unlike today), the critics of New Labour attacked its neglect of the relative living standards of the poor - in other words, equality. The argument of people like Wilkinson and Pickett is that equality - relative living standards - is as, if not more, important than absolute poverty once you reach an adequate level of subsistence.

JW: Yes and no, though there's a lot of truth in that, too. The analytical distinction between improving the condition of the poorest and reducing overall inequality in the society is important, and New Labour was (to borrow some old metaphors from T.H. Marshall) more interested in raising the floor than remodeling the overall structure. Nevertheless, we should recognize what the Blair/Brown governments did accomplish in terms of poverty reduction, which was not of trivial significance (if one considers the alternatives).

PR: Yes agreed. My main criticism of New Labour was precisely captured by Marshall's metaphor. The house in question is a model of political economy. Thatcher's abandonment of the post-war consensus to move into a new building reversed the post-war trend towards greater economic equality. It was felt that there was a conflict between efficiency and equality. Labour had long been the party that represented an alternative building, an evolving version of the post-war consensus. New Labour changed the party's role from being builders into home improvers. The house we were in certainly needed doing up and that was more than welcome. But I was always critical of this policy of accommodation as I felt that the new house was jerry-built and its foundations were subsiding. The old mansion next door was remarkably robust by comparison and I wanted us to move back in. In short, I thought they were improving the wrong house. We are living through the consequences of that structural failure, especially in Greece today. So the need to think in terms of alternative models of political economy has never been greater.
--------------------

Hard to argue with that last point. —Jeff Weintraub

Congressman Paul Ryan's real & imaginary health care plans (Jonathan Chait)

2011-11-05T13:05:00.009-04:00

As usual, Jonathan Chait hits the nail on the head. Some highlights:

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives a year ago, they promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. They did vote to repeal it. What about replacing it? Yeah … that part isn’t really happening. It’s a tricky position for Republicans, because, while the Affordable Care Act is not popular, neither is the old status quo. [....] They must act as though they have an alternative, yet this alternative remains perpetually in a hazy indeterminate future state.

That brings us to a very important point which should not be especially esoteric but which, to my surprise, rarely seems to be addressed or even sufficiently noticed in public discussions.

The official Republican party line is that the US health care system should not be tampered with because it is "the best in the world" (etc.). But among hard-right pro-market ideologues and public-policy advocates, from whom Ryan and other Republican ultras take their lead, the real position is quite different. The real agenda is to blow up the existing health care system, which they regard as so profoundly dysfunctional and otherwise objectionable that it can't be reformed, and radically marketize it (one code word to watch for is "consumer-driven health care")—not only dismantling Medicare (along with Social Security) and downsizing or eliminating Medicaid, but also undermining the whole system of tax-subsidized employer-based health insurance without replacing it with any publicly supported alternative.

None of that should sound surprising or at all speculative to anyone who follows, for example the Wall Street Journal editorial page. But, with very rare exceptions, Republican politicians can't actually come out and say that in public clearly and honestly.

At a recent town hall meeting, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan was confronted by a 53-year-old man with end-stage renal failure, who pointedly told him that, under Ryan’s plan, he will die. This is probably true. The Affordable Care Act provides private health insurance for people like him who otherwise could not obtain private insurance. Ryan’s response was to reassure the man that he would be taken care of [....]

The man in question is probably already on Medicare, which covers people with end stage renal disease regardless of age. Ryan has promised to grandfather in all current Medicare beneficiaries, but everyone else with a high-risk pre-existing condition would be left extremely vulnerable. [....]

Ryan explains that he supports the creation of high-risk pools, which is a special insurance system for people with expensive medical conditions. [....] Now, it is true that you could probably get insurers to cover a bunch of really sick people if the government threw enough money at them. But Ryan’s plan does not throw any money at them. Here, peruse the “Path to Prosperity,” the House GOP budget. There’s nothing in it for high-risk pools.

Contrary to the impression he left at the town hall, Ryan knows full well that his budget plan does nothing for the uninsured. [....]

Much as he wants to pretend otherwise, Ryan has a health-care plan. It’s to repeal the Affordable Care Act and let the uninsured fend for themselves.

Is any of that exaggerated, misleading, or excessively harsh? No. So read Chait's whole piece (below).

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
New York (On-Line)
November 4, 2011 at 09:35 AM
Paul Ryan Keeps Pretending Imaginary Health Care Plan Is Real [Update]
By Jonathan Chait

When Republicans took control of the House of Representatives a year ago *, they promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. They did vote to repeal it. What about replacing it? Yeah … that part isn’t really happening. It’s a tricky position for Republicans, because, while the Affordable Care Act is not popular, neither is the old status quo. This places the party in a tricky position. They must act as though they have an alternative, yet this alternative remains perpetually in a hazy indeterminate future state.

At a recent town hall meeting, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan was confronted by a 53-year-old man with end-stage renal failure, who pointedly told him that, under Ryan’s plan, he will die. This is probably true. The Affordable Care Act provides private health insurance for people like him who otherwise could not obtain private insurance. Ryan’s response was to reassure the man that he would be taken care of:

"You have a very unique health care condition. I'm very familiar with it," Ryan says. "The federal government basically stepped up and said, let's cover this disease because there's no way private insurance can cover this. We learned a lot about end-stage renal disease, and that is this: There are some people in society who through no fault of their own — you're a perfect example — get hit with an unpredictable extremely expensive illness."

Ryan explains that the solution is state-based "high-risk pools," which would protect the 8 percent of the population that needs such subsidies and lower premiums for the other 92 percent.

The audience applauds. And the man suffering from end-stage renal failure sits back down.

That’s from the Weekly Standard’s John McCormack, who uses the heartwarming tale to end his puff piece. (How puffy? In it, McCormack describes himself lobbying Ryan to enter the presidential race.) The man in question is probably already on Medicare, which covers people with end stage renal disease regardless of age. Ryan has promised to grandfather in all current Medicare beneficiaries, but everyone else with a high-risk pre-existing condition would be left extremely vulnerable.

Ryan explains that he supports the creation of high-risk pools, which is a special insurance system for people with expensive medical conditions. I should note that creating a system exclusively for people who are certain to ring up high medical costs is not really “insurance,” in the same sense that if you’re dialing up an insurer when your house is going up in flames, you’re really looking to buy a new house, not home insurance. Now, it is true that you could probably get insurers to cover a bunch of really sick people if the government threw enough money at them. But Ryan’s plan does not throw any money at them. Here, peruse the “Path to Prosperity,” the House GOP budget. There’s nothing in it for high-risk pools.

Contrary to the impression he left at the town hall, Ryan knows full well that his budget plan does nothing for the uninsured. Here he is, earlier in the summer, doing the thing where he pretends his imaginary alternative health-care plan is real:

Well, a budget resolution — because of the germaneness of reconciliation — you don’t put all those things in there, but there are a number of things I would do. Insurance reforms — not just inter-state shopping — but high-risk pools that are fully funded that subsidize those with pre-existing conditions. I really believe the tax exclusion is a huge source of health inflation, props up the third-party payment system and subsidizes the wrong people in society. If you’re in the top tax bracket, you get the biggest subsidy; if you’re in the lowest tax bracket, you get the smallest tax subsidy. It’s upside down. So I’ve always believed in refundable tax credits.

But you can’t address all those things in a budget resolution. You need more than a budget resolution.

So his explanation is that he didn’t budget any money for high-risk pools because you can’t do that in a budget. This is obviously silly. A budget is precisely where you set aside money that you intend to spend. Ryan left no money to subsidize high-risk pools because he didn’t want to leave enough money for it. Meanwhile, the “Path to Prosperity” was a wide-ranging wish list of conservative desire. It repealed the Dodd–Frank financial reform. Does deregulating Wall Street that have any relevance to the budget? No.

Much as he wants to pretend otherwise, Ryan has a health-care plan. It’s to repeal the Affordable Care Act and let the uninsured fend for themselves.

*This post has been corrected. An earlier version stated that it has been two years since Republicans took control of the House, not one. It has also been updated and the headline changed to note that Medicare covers end-stage renal disease regardless of age.

Republican-to-English glossary, revisited

2011-11-05T10:11:00.007-04:00

Back in 2006 I posted some definitions from a dictionary of Republican dialect passed along to me by my friend Gershon Shafir. I added a few definitions suggested by Mark Kleiman's English-Winglish Dictionary (update) and my own reflections on What US Republicans mean by "reform".

A few items in that compilation (mostly having to do with the foreign policy of the Bush II administration) are a bit less relevant now than they were in 2006, and some new words and phrases ought to be added (e.g., "job creators" = "millionaires who should not pay their fair share of taxes"). But I think that 2006 glossary of right-wing sloganeering remains useful as a guide to the perplexed.

And a few items, in particular, strike me as especially timely right now. See below.

—Jeff Weintraub

bipartisan /n./ Favorable to Republicans, but involving a few Democrats. (See also "partisan," "nonpartisan.")

class warfare /n./ Any attempt to raise the minimum wage [update: or any failure to politely ignore the undeniable reality of increasing concentration of wealth and income in the top 1%].

compassionate conservatism /n./ Poignant concern for the very wealthy [update: except that nowadays most Republican presidential candidates don't even pretend to be "compassionate," but instead compete to show who is most callous, hard-hearted, mean-spirited, and xenophobic].

growth /n./ 1. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. 2. What happens to the national debt when policy is made according to Definition #1.

partisan /adj. / Potentially damaging to Republicans. Ant.: "bipartisan," "nonpartisan" (q.v.)

pro-life /adj./ Valuing human life up until birth.

reform/v./ 1. To sabotage, undermine, eviscerate, and/or dismantle (e.g., "Social Security reform" or "reform" of environmental regulation). 2. More generally, to take a problem (either genuine or fabricated in whole or part) and use it as an excuse to enact policies that don't really help solve the problem, or that even make it worse, but that do advance other agendas that are less explicitly acknowledged (e.g., "Medicare reform," "tort law reform," "tax reform," "reform" of energy policy).

simplify the tax code /v./ To cut the taxes of Republican donors [update see here].

voter fraud /n./ Significant minority turnout [update: for some very useful elaboration, see "The GOP War on Voting"].

Utah professor fired for asking students questions in class

2011-11-02T14:34:00.005-04:00

This practice is called the "Socratic method" in law schools, though most of the time it's not really that similar to the way Socrates conducted philosophical discussions. At all events, not everyone likes it. From Inside Higher Ed:

Some students didn't take well to Steven Maranville’s teaching style at Utah Valley University. They complained that in the professor’s “capstone” business course, he asked them questions in class even when they didn't raise their hands. They also didn't like it when he made them work in teams.

Those complaints against him led [to] the university denying him tenure – a decision amounting to firing, according to a lawsuit Maranville filed against the university this month. [....]

A twist in Maranville's case is that he gave up tenure at the University of Houston to come to Utah Valley, with the expectation that he would be awarded tenure there after a year. He is now an associate professor at Westminster College, in Salt Lake City, and his suit says that he earns considerably less than he did in his previous position. [....]

Maranville followed the Socratic teaching style and described his way of teaching as "engaged learning," according to court documents. Those records describe teaching approaches designed to go beyond lectures. He would ask questions to stimulate discussion. He divided his students into teams and gave them assignments outside class. [....]

Walter Parker, a professor of education at the University of Washington, said he teaches using the “Socratic seminar” method. [....] "It is an interpretive discussion of a piece of text during which the professor says very little,” Parker said. “The professor chooses a rich piece of text and plans an interpretive question as he opens the discussion." [....]

The advantage of this kind of teaching is that students learn how to think on their feet, said Patricia King, a professor of education at the University of Michigan.

“But it requires hard intellectual work,” she said. [....]

"When done well, you simply do not impose the teacher's idea, and try to come up with a solution through dialogue," said Michael Apple, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. "In general, it is a guided dialogue." [....]

But he added that not that many faculty members use it these days. "The reason for its unpopularity sometimes is because we are in a test-based education system. Students can be increasingly impatient where the answer is not clear and when the professor is not giving it to them immediately." [....] Students may also think that they are being treated as if they were not very smart. [....]

In Maranville’s case, students did not see the value of his approach, the court records suggest. "Some students were quite vocal in their demands that he change his teaching style, which style had already been observed and approved by his peer faculty and administrative superiors,” according to the lawsuit. Students did not want to work in teams and did not want Maranville to ask questions. “They wanted him to lecture.” They also complained, according to the suit, that he did not know how to teach because he is blind. [....]

It so happens that when I teach seminars, I always ask students a lot of questions, even follow-up questions. And in many cases I ask students to work in teams—specifically, to meet in discussion groups outside the regular class meetings. Should I be worried?

=> Incidentally, to avoid possible misunderstanding, I believe quite strongly that lectures can play an important and valuable role as well, so I don't view this as an either/or matter. On the contrary, I would say that in some educational circles nowadays (apparently not at Utah Valley University, but certainly at some schools where I've taught) there is an absurdly exaggerated prejudice against lecturing that has done a lot of damage.

Obviously, there are good and bad lectures, and both lectures and discussions have their place. But students who don't have extensive experience of listening to substantial lectures, and who haven't learned to follow and engage them actively and intelligently, don't have the opportunity to watch someone develop a complex argument at length and to hold such arguments in their own heads. There are frequent complaints, no doubt justified, that growing up with TV and the internet in an increasingly sound-bite culture tends to give young people short attention spans. (Older people, too.) But stigmatizing lectures in general (or replacing them with pseudo-lectures based on PowerPoint presentations) only reinforces the problem.

Yours for Bildung,
Jeff Weintraub

New Labour and poverty reduction (Lane Kenworthy)

2011-11-02T10:27:00.009-04:00

I have been reading a very good book by my friend Lane Kenworthy, Progress for the Poor. It's a short book, but packed with information, insights, and thought-provoking arguments. Lane also has a gift for discussing complex subjects, including ones that require graphs and charts and the kinds of statistical analyses that many readers find off-putting, in clear and illuminating ways. (Anyone who follows his excellent blog, Consider the Evidence, already knows that—and if you don't follow his blog, why not?) Here's the back-cover blurb:

One of the principal goals of antipoverty efforts should be to improve the absolute living standards of the least well-off. This book aims to enhance our understanding of how to do that, drawing on the experiences of twenty affluent countries since the 1970s.

The book addresses a set of questions at the heart of political economy and public policy: How much does economic growth help the poor? When and why does growth fail to trickle down? How can social policy help? Can a country have a sizeable low-wage sector yet few poor households? Are universal programs better than targeted ones? What role can public services play in antipoverty efforts? What is the best tax mix? Is more social spending better for the poor? If we commit to improvement in the absolute living standards of the least well-off, must we sacrifice other desirable outcomes?

=>Right now I just want to quote a passage from p. 109 that highlights one legacy of Britain's New Labour governments. headed by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, which I don't think has gotten enough attention:

One of the most successful recent antipoverty efforts in affluent countries was that of the New Labour governments in the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2010. Though Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's governments focused much of their rhetoric and policy reform on increasing employment and economic opportunity, they also increased benefits and/or reduced taxes for low earners, single parents, and pensioners. Tom Sefton, John Hills, and Holly Sutherland calculate that benefit and tax changes between 1997 and 2005 increased real disposable income for bottom-income-decile households by about 20 percent. [JW: In the US, by contrast, the average income of the lowest 10%, including taxes and transfers, barely budged during that period; I suspect it may even be lower now than it was in 1997, though I don't have those precise figures readily available.] My calculations using data from the Luxembourg Income Study suggest a similar increase (Figure 2.2). It was one of the largest in any of the rich countries for which reliable data are available.

Blair and Brown did not initially campaign on an antipoverty program. And there is little indication of demand among the British public for a surge in government generosity toward the poor. If anything, public support for redistribution and assistance to the poor was declining during the late 1990s. Yet a year into New Labour's first term, the government made a commitment to end child poverty in the United Kingdom within a generation, and this led to a raft of policy initiatives that boosted income among Britain's poor.

One reason this part of the New Labour story is less well known than it might be is that Blair and Brown didn't boast about it very much. Johann Hari once suggested, with only some exaggeration, that they seemed to treat helping the poor as something to be embarrassed about. Presumably, they didn't think the issue was a vote-getter, and they may well have been right. Yet they pursued the substantive policies anyway. That's worth pondering, too.

—Jeff Weintraub

(P.S. Full disclosure: I happen to be one of the people mentioned by Lane Kenworthy in the acknowledgements to this book—perhaps too generously in my case, though I won't pretend I'm not gratified. But that doesn't affect my rigorous objectivity regarding the book itself, which is genuinely first-rate and worth reading.)

=> For a follow-up (11/7/2011), see here.

Is Social Security insolvent? — A reality check

2011-11-01T16:34:00.004-04:00

Michael O'Hare at The Reality-Based Community reports:

Last week I polled my mostly-undergraduate policy design class at Berkeley as follows:

A. Social Security is in very serious financial trouble and probably won’t be there for my parents
B. Social Security is in financial trouble and probably won’t be there for me
C. Social Security is basically OK and just needs some minor adjustments.

In case you're unsure, the correct answer is clearly and unequivocally C.

It's true that Medicare is on a path toward financial unsustainability (a problem intensified, perhaps intentionally, by the way the Bush/Rove prescription drug plan was designed) and will require some serious reforms down the line. As Paul Krugman has pointed out, right-wingers often try to blur the two together by talking about Social-Security-and-Medicare as if they were a single pathological entity. But that's just a rhetorical trick. In fact, the Social Security system is quite solvent; it is not due to run into even slight financial difficulties for decades; and those potential problems could indeed be solved with "some minor adjustments".

The results were 66% B, 16% each A and C. This is a level of misinformation in an educated population that puts the capacity of democratic governance in doubt, and raises serious questions about whether mainline media are playing straight with us. Articles like the Washington Post piece dissected and hung out to dry by Dean Baker demand we resurrect language like “kept press” from back in the thirties.

The fact that 82% of O'Hare's students (not just random voters, but people taking a public policy class at a highly-ranked university) were so wildly off-base about this is a tribute to the effectiveness of a decades-long campaign of distortion and disinformation by right-wing politicians and propagandists, aided and abetted by widespread economic illiteracy among journalists and pundits. The point, of course, is to panic the electorate into letting them undermine, eviscerate, and eventually dismantle Social Security under the guise of "reforming" it.

So far they haven't been able to do that, but if they continue to bamboozle the public so successfully, they might pull it off sometime in the future—in which case Social Security really won't be there for these students when they retire. So it's important to make it clear that this whole Chicken Little story about the imminent collapse of the Social Security system (a "Ponzi scheme" and "a monstrous lie," according to Rick Perry) is simply bogus.

For a more concise version of (part of) the argument in Dean Baker's piece, you can see this post by Paul Krugman.

—Jeff Weintraub

The Republican "Flat Tax Fantasy" (Ross Douthat)

2011-11-01T14:34:00.003-04:00

I have mixed feelings about Ross Douthat, one of the two designated conservatives among the regular columnists for the New York Times. But he's clearly a bright and serious guy (and less irritatingly tedious and superficial than David Brooks). Every once in a while, he hits the nail on the head.

For example, on October 27 Douthat became exasperated with some other right-wing pundits who correctly ridiculed Rick Perry's transparently cynical and unserious proposal for an "un-flat, optional 'flat tax'" (as John Podhoretz put it) ... but who continue to pretend that some better-designed version of a flat tax might make sense. Douthat suggested that such people should finally drop this perennial Steve Forbes fantasy and try to face reality:

In reality, the fact that Perry’s non-flat “flat” tax plan is egregiously cynical is the only remotely reasonable thing about it — because in the present socioeconomic landscape, the “hard work” of selling an actual flat tax would amount to a swift form of political suicide. A Republican politician could have all the eloquence, charm and charisma in the world, and he still wouldn’t be able to sell the American public — or even, I suspect, the Republican electorate, Herman Cain’s current poll numbers notwithstanding — on the notion that their own taxes should go up to pay for a tax cut for the top 10 or 5 or 1 percent of earners. (It’s fun to imagine the attack ads: “Rick Perry: He’s Ronald Reagan for the rich, and Walter Mondale for the rest of you.) The idea is both politically and substantively crazy, unmoored from the realities of both the current economic crisis and the decade of wage stagnation for the non-rich that preceded it. And the fact that this, of all things, has become the hot economic policy idea of the Republican primary season says something more devastating about the state of the G.O.P. than any of the other foolishness that Podhoretz cites in his column.

Right. So the obvious next question is whether the Republican party, in its current state, should be taken seriously as a potential governing party by anyone with a trace of intelligence and concern for the public interest. I'm not sure Douthat really faces up to that one.

—Jeff Weintraub

My personal link to the residues of Soviet consumer culture

2011-10-31T16:37:00.005-04:00

I happened to be reading a TLS review of a recent book titled Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design, an edited collection that the reviewer describes as combining "tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for Soviet kitsch with important insights into how the Soviet economy worked."

My heading for this post is also tongue-in-cheek to some degree, but not entirely. Unlikely as it might sound now, the Soviet Union really did make an effort to compete with the capitalist world on the terrain of stimulating and then satisfying consumer desires. (For one illuminating account of this Soviet version of modern consumer culture, see Anna Paretskaya's 2010 article on "The Soviet Communist Party and the Other Spirit of Capitalism".)

Of course, that effort was not a spectacular success. It's not hard to think of some iconic triumphs of Soviet design, but the ones that come most readily to mind, at least to my mind, tend to be military—like the T-34 tank, possibly the all-around best tank of World War II, or the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle that continues to flood weapons markets around the world. The general run of Soviet consumer goods were notoriously drab and shoddy, or kitschy at best. And according to the reviewer, and presumably the book itself, the better Soviet-era products intended for purchase and everyday use by civilians often tended to be rip-offs of western designs.

But then I came across this passage:

One of the few items still on the market today is the bevelled twelve-sided glass, sturdy and pleasingly tactile. It is even sold in the West, in IKEA stores – the only item you are likely to see with a "Made in Russia" label. The glass was designed in 1943 by Vera Mukhina, the artist better known for her iconic statue of the male worker and the female peasant holding aloft the hammer and sickle.

Well, it so happens that my wife and I have a set of 6 of these glasses, with both "IKEA" and "Made in Russia" announced boldly on the bottom of each. (Purchased at a thrift store, not from IKEA directly. I do a lot of my shopping at thrift stores, and in the Main Line area west of Philadelphia, where we live, the thrift stores carry a lot of high-quality second-hand stuff.) I had no idea of their historic significance, but I can report that they are indeed well-designed: handsome, sturdy, pleasantly comfortable to handle, and reassuringly solid. None of them has ever broken or cracked. So the achievements of Soviet material culture continue to live on in our household. Who would have guessed?

—Jeff Weintraub

Who pays taxes? (continued)

2011-10-30T18:14:00.013-04:00

A follow-up to my earlier post on Who pays taxes? — Right-wing propaganda vs. reality.

While Republicans almost monolithically refuse to consider raising taxes on rich people, on the grounds that this would be unfair and punitive as well as economically disastrous, a number of them have begun to propose raising taxes on the non-rich instead. (If you think I'm making that up, or exaggerating, read this informative piece by David Weigel in Slate ... and have a look at the second video clip in this post, too.)

This gambit involves the migration of a long-standing right-wing talking point from venues like the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the right-wing blogosphere, where it remained relatively esoteric except for ideologues and policy wonks, to the unabashed sloganeering of Republican politicians, including Republican presidential candidates. Here is the way Michelle Bachmann formulated this talking point in August:

"Part of the problem is today, only 53 percent pay any federal income tax at all; 47 percent pay nothing," said Bachmann. "We need to broaden the base so that everybody pays something, even if it's a dollar. Everyone should pay something, because we all benefit."

Note the characteristic slide from claiming that 47% don't "pay any federal income tax" to claiming that those deadbeats "pay nothing"—which, of course, ignores other federal taxes, excise taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and other state and local taxes.

This has long been a rhetorical trick used by pro-plutocratic propagandists: first claim that a certain proportion of non-rich Americans pay no net federal income tax (playing on the fact that "federal income tax" is a technical term which excludes the federal "payroll taxes" that all employed Americans pay on their income), and then pretend or insinuate that this means lots of non-rich Americans pay no taxes at all. If you ever feel tempted to fall for that line, go back here.

Is it really true that the wealthy (or, as they call them on Fox News, the "job creators") already pay a grossly disproportionate share of taxes? Is it really true that a large proportion of the non-rich "pay nothing"? I apologize for repeating myself, but the answers to both questions are no.

In a recent post, Jonathan Chait summed things up concisely:

Here’s the total picture. The highest-earning 1 percent take home 20 percent of the national income and pay 21 percent of the total taxes. Unfair to the rich? Exploitative? I suppose you could make the case. But I haven’t seen any conservative actually make it, as opposed to try to mislead their audience about the underlying facts.

OK, if you want to be picky, the highly informative chart to which we both referred gives those figures as 20.3% and 21.5%, respectively. But you get the idea. And the piece from which that chart is taken emphasizes, correctly, that "All Americans pay taxes."

But right-wing polemicists use a wide range of rhetorical tricks, evasions, and outright falsehoods to deny, distort, or obscure that inconvenient reality. I don't have the time or energy to keep up with all of them, but in two of his recent posts Jon Chait did a good job of surveying and debunking some frequent examples. Like everything Chait writes, they're worth reading. See here and here.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. Taxes aside, some right-wing propagandists actually try to argue that increasing economic inequality in the US is just a "myth"—which entails a truly heroic effort to deny the undeniable. Again, if you don't believe me, you can find a systematic examination and debunking of one representative example here.

The news from Richistan, 2004 (Robert Frank)

2011-10-29T18:48:00.010-04:00

Via Brad DeLong:

"By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year—greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada."

—Robert Frank, Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom [2007]

Of course, as a commenter on Brad's blog pointed out, the term "earning" shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value here. It's just the conventional way of saying that they were "getting" about $1.35 trillion a year. We could also say that most of them were actively "making" money one way or another, since Frank emphasizes that few of the current rich are living on inherited wealth or simply clipping coupons. But the extent to which they had all "earned" such a huge slice of the national income is a more tricky issue. (Bernie Madoff was out hustling, too.)

But anyway, that was in 2004. Since then, as we know, the total income of the top 1% has gone up considerably, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the overall national income. Not so for the bottom 80%. For some details, see here.

And over the past three decades the social distance between the lives of rich and everyone else has been increasing significantly. (When the merely rich want to assess their situation, they compare themselves, not to the non-rich, but to the very rich, while the very rich compare themselves to the super-rich. Most people worth $5 million, a tiny proportion of the US population, don't think they're rich. This helps explain how the rich, on the whole, can sincerely consider themselves hard-pressed, hard-working "middle-class" families who couldn't possibly afford the burdens of Clinton-era taxes.) To an increasing extent, as Frank shows, the rich live in a different country from everyone else, Richistan. And at the same time, they have an increasingly disproportionate influence in shaping politics and public policy in the country they share with other Americans, the United States.

Those of you who haven't read Richistan should consider doing so. It's witty and engaging as well as informative and illuminating. If you read it, it will probably tell you some significant things you didn't already know about the economic sociology of America over the past 3 decades.

=> By the way, Frank has suggested elsewhere that, despite everything, distinctions of class in America (as opposed to income inequalities per se) are still more "blurred" than they were in some previous eras—largely because so much of current mega-wealth is new money.

Yes, it’s true that today’s rich have become financially removed from the rest of American society. Yet culturally, today’s rich resemble the middle class more than they do the old elite. The vast majority of today’s rich didn’t inherit their money, but made it themselves. So they retain their working-world values, even if they look more like plutocrats in their spending and daily lives. [....] As far as I can tell, the separations today that have created Richistan are far more about money than they are about class.

Well, yes and no. If one examines that disclaimer carefully, it actually says less than it might appear to—and is probably drawing on an overly narrow and misleading sense of the word "class".

And even this equivocal reinterpretation by Frank of the sociological implications of his reporting is hard to square with what Frank himself said in the passage from the Introduction to Richistan from which Brad DeLong was quoting. As Frank did his ethnographic reporting on the New Rich, he says, the following realization began to dawn on him:

Today's rich had formed their own virtual country. They were, in fact, wealthier than most nations. By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year—greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.

And with their huge numbers, they had build a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with their own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel network (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language ("Who's your household manager?"). [....] The rich weren't just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.

They were creating Richistan.

QED. For some further explanation of what this erosion of common experience actually means in terms of class divisions, one might consult T.H. Marshall's still-classic essay on "Citizenship and Social Class" (1949).

—Jeff Weintraub

Tough times for college graduates (Michael Mandel)

2011-10-28T09:28:00.009-04:00

Actually, for some time now the economic situation for almost everyone outside the top 20% has, generally speaking, been stagnant or increasingly insecure (often both), and for significant sectors it has been declining, while the top 1% have been making out like bandits. There have been winners as well as losers, of course, but the losers outnumber the winners.

Some data provided by Michael Mandel (at Mandel on Innovation and Growth) bring out one more aspect of this overall picture. On average, college graduates do considerably better in terms of lifetime earnings than people without college degrees (leaving aside some famous exceptions like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs). But if we look at college graduates alone, their economic prospects have also been declining. And this trend goes back before the current recession.

That's true for both young men and young women with college degrees. But the gender differences remain striking. As Mandel sums it up:

I started writing about tough times for young college grads in 2006, when I was at Business Week. Seems like a different day and age, doesn’t it? Since then things have only gotten much much worse. By my latest calculations:
Real earnings for young male college grads are down 19% since their peak in 2000.
Real earnings for young female college grads are down 16% since their peak in 2003.
[JW: And the peak for recent female graduates was significantly lower than the peak for males.] These figures are for full-time workers, ages 25-34, with a bachelor’s degree only. See the charts below.

I want to ask an economic question, a political question, and a policy question. First, no one has given me a good explanation yet of why young American college grads should have been hit so hard. Is there increased competition with young college grads around the world? Are new college grads lower quality than their predecessors? Has information technology reduced the need for young grads? I really would like to know. [....]

Me, too. The rest is here. You can click on the graphs below to expand them.

Tyler Cowen notes that this pattern of declining economic prospects for college graduates coincides with increasingly high costs for going to college. If both of those trends continue, that probably means trouble ahead.

--Jeff Weintraub

"Life Without Stimulus" — A US/UK comparison (Martin Sullivan)

2011-10-27T10:23:00.010-04:00

What would have been the consequences for the US economy if Obama and the Democrats had not managed to pass the 2009 economic "stimulus," imperfect as it was, against ferocious and almost monolithic Republican obstructionism? As I have already noted on a few occasions, it's pretty clear that the results would have been disastrous, and we would now be in much worse shape than we actually are. In short, the "stimulus" worked—not as well as it might have if it had been bigger and better designed, perhaps, but a lot better than the alternative option of not passing it at all. (For some details and elaboration, see here & here & here & here.)

In case you remain unconvinced, Brad DeLong just re-posted a very useful and illuminating graph by Martin Sullivan (at TAX.com) that throws some instructive light on this question. The experiment of responding to the current recession with belt-tightening austerity rather than with Keynesian counter-cyclical deficit spending has actually been tried, in Britain. (That followed an initial set of Keynesian stimulus measures by Gordon Brown's Labour government, which did pull the British economy out of free fall; but then Brown was voted out of office and replaced by David Cameron's Conservative/Liberal Democratic coalition government, which switched to a Hooverite approach.) How has that worked out?

—Jeff Weintraub

==============================
TAX.com
October 24, 2011
Life Without Stimulus
By Martin A. Sullivan

Republicans constantly remind us that the Obama stimulus--the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009--did not work. They voted against it. In the United Kingdom the government is led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron. His government did not adopt stimulus. Instead it boldly enacted an economic program that cut spending and raised taxes. The chart below shows the results and compares it to the U.S. experience. After three and a half years, U.S. GDP is just about returning to the pre-recession peak. That's awful. But it s far better than the U.K. where GDP is still five percent ($750 billion in US terms) below its pre-recession peak.

Reihan Salam explains why my cousin Hal is right, and textbook publishers are self-serving, dishonest, greedy bastards

2011-10-26T14:52:00.009-04:00

It's a strange world when a piece in the National Review Online praises a public-service initiative spearheaded by my cousin Hal Plotkin, a Senior Policy Adviser in the higher education division of the Obama Department of Education ... and strongly defends this initiative against efforts by profit-hungry corporations, their lobbyists, and their Congressional lackeys to kill it.

Well, sometimes the world is a little more complicated complicated than one might expect. The author of this particular piece, Reihan Salam, happens to be a genuinely thoughtful and intellectually serious conservative writer, not a party-line hack (unlike most people who write for the National Review, honesty compels me to add). Sometimes he's even correct. This is one of those times, and the message of his piece might actually have more practical impact appearing in a prominent right-wing venue like NRO than it would elsewhere. See below.

(And for some other pieces on this Open Educational Resources initiative and the corporate backlash against it, see here & here & here.)

—Jeff Weintraub

===================================
National Review Online
October 24, 2011
The Attack on Open Educational Resources
By Reihan Salam

Amy Laitinen raises an issue that should be of particular interest to conservatives and libertarians. Under the leadership of Hal Plotkin, the Departments of Labor and Education have been collaborating to make all taxpayer-funded online educational resources freely available to all comers. The idea is that if Uncle Sam pays for these resources, everyone should be able to use them, from the unemployed to for-profit businesses that want to improve on them to homeschoolers. Kevin Carey described the possibilities back in May:

The $2-billion Labor-Education project could transport the open-resource movement to a new level of prominence. Because the materials will be developed under the auspices of a federal-government competition, they will carry an assumed mark of quality absent from random lectures posted on YouTube. The departments also plan to organize the materials so that educators can search and shape them into rational sequences of learning. Private companies will be able to repackage, improve upon, and sell the materials they like, as long as they acknowledge the original developers.

Now, however, there has been a counterattack in a proposed House FY12 Labor, Health, and Human Services appropriations bill, as Laitinen explains:

SEC. 124. None of the funds made available by this Act for the Department of Labor may be used to develop new courses, modules, learning materials, or projects in carrying out education or career job training grant programs unless the Secretary of Labor certifies, after a comprehensive market-based analysis, that such courses, modules, learning materials, or projects are not otherwise available for purchase or licensing in the marketplace or under development for students who require them to participate in such education or career job training grant programs.

As a believer in the potential of for-profit education, I’m not averse to the argument that the public sector shouldn’t simply duplicate what is already available in the private sector. That is reasonable. But that’s a bit like saying that Linux duplicates Windows 7 or Mac OS X. Open, free platforms are meaningfully different because they are far more accessible.

The idea here isn’t to rip off the textbook publishers that want to kill open educational resources. Rather, it is to provide people around the country, and around the world, with the basic building blocks they need to help themselves. The major textbook publishers, in contrast, would go out of business if it weren’t for large, subsidized public educational institutions that will pay almost any price for low-quality instructional materials because they’re not paying for them with their own money. By making a small investment in open educational resources, we can comfortably reduce the amount of money that flows into government purchases of other instructional materials by much more. That is the ultimate promise of the open-resource movement: it can save taxpayers money while delivering a higher quality of service.

To repeat: the textbook publishers might be “private,” but they depend on lucrative public sector contracts. That is why they pour money into lobbying public officials, many of whom they later hire to lobby their former colleagues. We’d be much better off supporting for-profit entrepreneurs who make money by improving the quality of instructional materials rather than by improving their ability to chisel more money out of taxpayers. They are not the same.

US income inequality in the New Gilded Age — CBO report confirms that the past three decades have been a spectacular bonanza for the top 1%

2011-10-26T09:02:00.027-04:00

As everyone knows who has been paying any serious attention (with the exception of some propagandists at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and similar venues), over the past three decades there has been a massive increase in economic inequality in the US, taking us back to plutocratic concentrations of wealth and income last seen from the Gilded Age through the 1920s. Not only have the benefits of economic growth gone disproportionately to the wealthy, but an astounding proportion of the overall growth in national income has been monopolized by the top 1% of households. For one very effective graphic presentation of this pattern by Lane Kenworthy in 2008, see here.

The Congressional Budget Office just issued a report analyzing trends in the distribution of household income, after taxes, from 1979 (i.e., just before the election of Ronald Reagan) through 2007 (i.e., just before the current economic crash). The CBO report further confirms the basic picture with which we're already familiar, and adds some more graphs and charts that help to bring it home in a vivid way.

As Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo sums up the major findings:

CBO found that, between 1979 and 2007, after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households. That dwarfs income growth for middle and lower income households over the same time frame — nearly three decades during which the rising tide vaulted yachts and cruise ships, but barely nudged house and tugboats.

Specifically:

CBO finds that, between 1979 and 2007, income grew by:

* 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households,
* 65 percent for the next 19 percent,
* Just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent, and
* 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent.

And here are some of their graphs (you can click on them to expand them):

-

-

---

The key factor, of course, has been the massive long-term redistribution of pre-tax income toward the top of the economic scale. But contrary to what some people may assume, federal taxes and transfers have not done much to counter this tendency. (At least, in terms of money income—I don't know how one would factor in, say, Medicare and Medicaid, since the medical care they help provide represents real but non-monetary income.) Again, Beutler sums up the larger picture:

CBO notes, “the highest income quintile’s share [JW: i.e., the share of the top 20%] of market income increased from 50 percent to 60 percent [between 1979 and 2007]. The share of market income for every other quintile declined…. In fact, the distribution of market income became more unequal almost continuously between 1979 and 2007 except during the recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001.” There’s no professional consensus about why this happened, though the explosive growths of the financial sector, executive compensation, and celebrity pay are among the likeliest culprits.

[JW: Another crucial factor is certainly the long-term collapse of the labor movement and its mutually-reinforcing economic and political consequences, both direct and indirect.]

But federal policy has exacerbated the trend. Income taxes have become less progressive in the last three decades, and federal programs that used to benefit poor people have shrunk or disappeared altogether. That’s left Social Security and Medicare as the biggest federal wealth transfer programs, both of which benefit people at all income levels, not just the poor and middle class. In other words, federal programs have become less progressive in their distribution.

If you think of all income as a single pie, almost everyone’s slice has shrunk since 2007 thanks to the explosive growth of the top 1 percent relative to fairly minor gains for everybody else.

There's more here, and the CBO report is available here.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. One counter-argument offered by pro-plutocratic analysts and propagandists is that this dramatic increase in income inequality is justified by the fact that it has helped promote overall economic growth, which has benefited everyone. (The favorite right-wing slogan used to sum up this argument, based on the somewhat misleading use of a quotation attributed to John F. Kennedy, is the claim that "a rising tide" automatically and necessarily "lifts all boats.") But there is actually no good reason to believe that this argument holds any water.

And pro-plutocratic apologists would first have to explain away an inconvenient historical comparison (rather than trying to ignore it, as they usually do): During the quarter-century that followed the Second World War, income inequality in the US was much lower than it is now, tax rates for the wealthy were considerably higher, labor unions were much stronger, financial regulation was much tighter, and the benefits of economic growth were much more evenly distributed across the income scale ... but the overall rate of economic growth was significantly higher than it has been for the period since 1980. (And to complicate matters further, in the period since 1980 overall growth rates were most robust during the presidency of Bill Clinton, after he raised taxes.) How do they explain that?

(Sure, one can imagine possible arguments that could be used to explain away this embarrassment, and some have been attempted. But most of the time the apologists for the new plutocracy don't even acknowledge the problem, and hope that the rest of us won't notice it, either.)

"The untold story of the actual Obama record" (Andrew Sullivan)

2011-10-23T11:13:00.013-04:00

(With some analytically pertinent remarks by Barney Frank about the problem of counterfactuals.)

Andrew Sullivan and one of his readers (quoted below) get it basically right. One could quibble about some points, and overall my assessment of the Obama administration's record is more mixed than theirs—mostly because I think that in some critical ways Obama and his administration really have been too timid, too willing to cave in to the Republicans, and at times too close to Republican thinking themselves. But Sullivan and his reader accurately sum up a very important part of the overall picture ... which, as they correctly point out, is strangely missing from a lot of public discourse nowadays. And the right-wing counter-narrative about Obama's record is, of course, ludicrous.

=> For example, it's clear that the 2009 economic "stimulus" (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) was too small—especially since the economic crash of 2007-2009 turns out to have been more severe than most analysts recognized at the time—and in various ways it could have been better designed. But if no serious stimulus had been passed at all, and passed quickly, the results would have been disastrous. The self-reinforcing downward spiral of the economy would almost certainly have gone into free fall, official unemployment might well be closer to 15% than 9%, and instead of our current Great Recession we would probably have something more like another Great Depression. Instead, within a few months of the passage of the ARRA the economy stabilized and then gradually began to recover. Let's just quote Mark Zandi, who is not a left-liberal neo-Keynesian but a quintessential mainstream economist who was an economic adviser for John McCain in 2008.

[W]e would be in a measurably worse place if not for the stimulus. I don’t think it is any coincidence that the great recession ended [i.e., the economy stopped contracting] at precisely the same time that the stimulus, and in this case when I say stimulus I am talking about the [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] … was providing its maximum economic benefit.

In short, the 2009 economic "stimulus" worked—probably not as well as it could have, but definitely a lot better than the alternative option of not passing it at all. The only people who try to pretend otherwise are economic illiterates, a few sincere but misguided economic cranks, and/or cynical partisan propagandists who don't really care about the facts one way or another. On the other hand, the Democrats, including Obama, have been remarkably ineffective in telling their side of this story. They need to do a lot better.

It should not be forgotten that the ARRA, which played a crucial and indispensable role in saving the economy from disaster, was passed against monolithic, almost unanimous opposition by the Congressional Republicans. It did not receive a single Republican vote in the House of Representatives, and the Republicans proposed no serious alternative (obviously, the adjective "serious" is key here, since they did come up with various inadequate and mostly irrelevant flimflam proposals). Then the only way to get the ARRA through the Senate, in the face of a Republican filibuster, was for the Democrats to obtain the cooperation of what were then the last three "moderate" Republican Senators, the two Senators from Maine and now-former-Senator Arlen Spector. And in order to do that, they had to agree to a series of extremely unwise modifications that rendered the ARRA even less effective than its House version (which was already too watered-down). Except for those three, the other Senate Republicans voted monolithically against the ARRA. If it had been up to the Republicans, the economy would almost certainly have gone over the edge in 2009.

=> So while Obama's record so far is definitely subject to a lot of valid criticisms, in my opinion, it's also true that critics need to keep a sense of perspective. Policies and outcomes always have to be judged, not only in light of the ideal or the most desirable, but also in light of the range of realistically available alternatives (which, admittedly, are usually not easy to specify precisely).

The deepest and most illuminating analyses of the resulting dilemmas, for both political judgment and historical explanation, are probably those of Max Weber. But in 2009 the well-known social philosopher Barney Frank offered an interesting reflection of his own on this larger analytical point. What follows is a quotation that I have been saving for a paper I plan to write (eventually) on the subject of what analytical philosophers call "counterfactuals," but why wait?

From a Congressional hearing reported by the Washington Post (7/21/2009):

REP BARNEY FRANK: Not for the first time, as a -- a -- an elected official, I envy economists. Economists have available to them, in an analytical approach, the counterfactual. Economists can explain that a given decision was the best one that could be made, because they can show what would have happened in the counterfactual situation. They can contrast what happened to what would have happened.

No one has ever gotten reelected where the bumper sticker said, "It would have been worse without me." You probably can get tenure with that. But you can't win office. [....]

Probably true. But it's the kind of argument that often should be taken seriously in politics ... up to a point.

—Jeff Weintraub
==============================
Andrew Sullivan (The Daily Dish)
October 20, 2011
The Untold Story Of The Actual Obama Record

[....]

I can't put it better than this longtime Dish reader:

Personally, I am praying that Obama's messaging improves drastically. (It has failed on multiple occasions - not the least of which was during August/September of 2008.)

The truth is that this President has done a good job in what has been one of the most difficult periods of modern history. He saved the economy from ruin (until the Tea Party took over Congress) with a stimulus that was as large as possible given the political realities, presided over a stock market that fairly quickly recouped many of its losses, presided over almost consecutive monthly increases in private sector job growth (unfortunately balanced by monthly decreases in public sector jobs which I attribute to the GOP further starving government), enacted the only meaningful healthcare reform ever in our history [JW: obviously a bit of an overstatement, probably written carelessly and in haste], passed financial reform (no matter what the Left says, he did this), saved the auto industry (which Romney is on record opposing), fired the first salvo of the Arab Spring with his address in Cairo no less, drawn down our footprint in Iraq in a responsible way (and headed toward almost total withdrawal), stopped numerous terrorist attacks in this country, stopped torture as policy, repealed DADT, joined the international community in a measured and responsible way to bring down an odious tyrant in Qaddafi, and killed a whole generation of al Qaeda leaders. And taking out Osama bin Laden the way he did will go down as one of the bravest military actions in American history.

I know this President is not popular, and it is very unpopular to defend him in such a way. I don't care. For this country to dump him for anyone on the other side would be a terrible thing. Progress is slow and painful, but we are doing it. Is that fashionable to say? No. Again, I don't care.

Amen. And the way in which the ADD media simply jumps to the next cycle of spinmanship only furthers the amnesia. But the Obama administration also shares some of the blame.

Many of them have been too focused on governing to explain what the fuck they're doing. There's a technocratic arrogance to them at times that is too blind to winning and sustaining arguments and narratives. And this is kinda mind-blowing because the record is so remarkable in retrospect.

If you'd told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history ... well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.

But we are where we are - and the economic pain is real and the president must take his lumps. The good news for those of us who still back Obama and hope for his re-election is that even with all this positive record essentially dismissed and little of it capitalized on politically, Obama is still neck and neck with any likely opponent. And he is his own best messager.

At some point, he needs to shuck off the restraint, and tell the actual story of the last three years - against the fantastic and self-serving lies and delusions we keep hearing in Republican debates and Beltway chatter. If he does it with panache, he won't need a jumpsuit onto an aircraft carrier. And many of his missions may even be accomplished.

"Almost comical" anti-Israel prejudice in the Guardian, dissected by Jeffrey Goldberg & Norman Geras

2011-10-22T16:46:00.010-04:00

A constant drumbeat of obsessively hostile anti-Zionist propaganda (sometimes shading off into borderline anti-semitism), presented in the guise of serious analysis, has become so routine and reflexive in allegedly "progressive" British newspapers like the Guardian that one can feel tempted to simply ignore it. But it's worth highlighting examples from time to time, to avoid taking this stuff for granted and having it start sounding like common sense.

I notice that a recent piece of this sort by a columnist named Deborah Orr ("Is an Israeli life really more important than a Palestinian's?") was called out by Norman Geras in Britain and by Jeffrey Goldberg in the US. Both of their critiques are worth quoting.

Here is Orr's Guardian piece in full (the bolding is Goldberg's). The key point is that the mind-set it reveals is neither unusual nor extreme, but entirely run-of the mill. And her piece is also short enough that one can easily quote the whole thing:

It's quite something, the prisoner swap between Hamas and the Israeli government that returns Gilad Shalit to his family, and more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to theirs. The deal is widely viewed as a victory for Hamas, the radical Islamist group that gained power in Gaza after years of frustration at the intractability of the "peace process". Conversely, it is being seen by some as a sign of weakness in Israel's rightwing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

All this, I fear, is simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives. Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit's life so greatly.

Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don't have much to bargain with.

At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe - that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.

The Israeli government and Israeli public opinion were willing, rightly or wrongly, to pay an enormously lopsided price in order to set Gilad Shalit free, even if that required the release of hundreds of convicted murderers who might well try to kill other Israeli civilians in the future. Orr's immediate reaction, of course, is that this must reveal something evil (even "obscene") about the way Israelis and those who sympathize with Israelis view the world ... and that any discussion of this incident has to be somehow given an anti-Jewish spin, even if that requires a bit of logical and rhetorical straining. Presumably, Orr is just doing her job as a columnist as she understands it. I suspect she doesn't even think of herself as a bigoted person. (Bigots often don't.)

Jeffrey Goldberg responds with some pertinent "thoughts and questions":

She's got to be kidding.
Assuming Ms. Orr is not kidding, how is it possibly Israel's fault that Hamas demanded the release of 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit? Isn't this a question for Hamas?
Is the prime minister of Israel not supposed to value Israeli life? Asked another way: Is the British prime minister not supposed to do whatever he can to help one of his soldiers? Have I missed something about the nature of the relationship between the British prime minister and his fellow citizens?
"Chosen"? Really? Does Ms. Orr understand Jewish theology? (This is a rhetorical question). "Chosenness" in Jewish theology actually means "burdened," as in, Jews are burdened by their faith with special responsibilities to carry out what Judaism understands to be God's wishes. Chosenness does not mean "exclusive" or "more equal than others." It never has, except to anti-Semites. Christians believe they are in possession of the final word of God, as do Muslims. This belief fosters a feeling of theological superiority. Does this make Christians and Muslims "chosen" as well? Or is the term "chosenness" only a weapon for use against Jews? (This, too, is a rhetorical question).
A question for the Guardian: Shouldn't your editors do a better job of masking prejudice on your website?

And here is Norm's reaction (Either-Orr):

You may think you've plumbed the depths of human stupidity and blind prejudice, but you never have. It is bottomless. Deborah Orr is of the opinion that the exchange of Gilad Shalit's freedom for that of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners underwrites 'the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives'. She asks: 'who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians?' By accepting the terms of the exchange, she contends, Hamas display their eagerness 'to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours'.

I urge upon you this brief thought experiment. The Israelis offer to free a single Palestinian prisoner - one, let us say, not responsible for terrorist murder, and in that regard just like Shalit - for the young Israeli hostage. Hamas's leaders deliberate. Do they hold out for a better 'rate of exchange'? Orr do they just agree, 'OK, guys, why not - one for one?' I won't insult anyone's intelligence further by suggesting the result.

But it is 'the lives of the chosen' - she means Jews - that are of 'hugely greater consequence'. Yes, indeed. That has been the world's opinion to date, has it not? - and is still the opinion of those many who find room in their consciences for the idea that murdering Jews is understandable in the given circumstances.

[See now also here.]

—Jeff Weintraub

[Update, 10/26/2011: Deborah Orr has issued a routine sort of non-apology apology which evades all the important issues and indicates that she still doesn't quite understand why some people got so upset about her original piece.]

Elizabeth Warren explains why the US had no serious financial crises between the New Deal and the Reagan administration

2011-10-21T17:58:00.009-04:00

That's right, there weren't any. Why not, and why have they come back after 1980?

Basically, the answer is that during the the 1930s a remarkably intelligent set of regulations was enacted to cover banking and the rest of the financial sector, and it worked. Then, starting in the 1980s, this valuable and highly successful framework of financial regulation was increasingly dismantled—not sensibly updated and adapted to new conditions, but heedlessly dismantled—in a process that combined free-market-fundamentalist ideological illusions with substantial amounts of irresponsibility, plutocratic muscle, political corruption, and simple greed. And it so happens that during the same period, starting in the 1980s, we have once again experienced recurrent financial crises (and massive bailouts), escalating most recently into the great financial crash of 2007-2009 from which we are still recovering. Coincidence? Unlikely.

In short, we have been engaged in a large-scale socio-economic experiment to test whether the unhampered operation of radically deregulated financial markets makes them more self-stabilizing, more efficient, and more beneficial for the economy and the larger society or, on the contrary, more volatile and unstable, more economically distorting, and more dangerous. Well?

This historical story should be one of those things that everyone knows about, to which everyone refers as a matter of course in debates about economic policy. But it isn't. In the video clip below, the always impressive Elizabeth Warren does an excellent job of boiling the story down to its essentials.

—Jeff Weintraub

P.S. By the way, it's worth noting that even Adam Smith, the great theorist of the self-regulating market economy, recognized that financial markets posed special dangers and required special protections and precautions ... which he described in one passage as safety measures analogous to requiring firewalls in sensible housing codes.

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of a whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed. (Wealth of Nations, Book II, ch. ii)

Bridenapping today (Mick Hartley)

2011-10-12T10:22:00.008-04:00

Another slice of reality from the ever-observant Mick Hartley. This is the sort of phenomenon the one sometimes assumes everyone must know about. Not really.

—Jeff Weintraub
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Mick Hartley (Politics & Culture)
October 12, 2011
Bridenapping

Put simply: to not kidnap your wife means you are not a man.

I posted last year on the practice of bride kidnapping - "bridenapping" - in Kyrgyzstan. By some estimates the practice accounts for around 70% of marriages there. And, according to Emily Dugan, the practice is growing, not only in Kyrgyzstan, where it's seen as a reassertion of traditional cultural values after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but elsewhere too. In Somalia, for instance:

Last year, Asana, a 14-year-old from Somalia, popped out to get some meat and milk for her mother. As she walked in a Mogadishu market, a car with blacked-out windows pulled up, a door was flung open and she was dragged inside. A man she had never seen before said to the driver: "This is my wife; we just got engaged." The man was Mohamed Dahir, a leader of the terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Her money was taken, she was locked away and forced to become Dahir's wife....

The lack of awareness, and therefore of any worldwide campaign on the issue, leaves little hope for women such as Asana (her name has been changed to protect her from Al-Shabaab, who still send her death threats). Now 15, and bringing up Dahir's baby son, she considers herself one of the luckier ones. She managed to escape to Kenya after Dahir was killed in a shoot-out. Her story, however, would not be considered "lucky" by many.

Sitting in a plastic chair that dwarfs her childlike frame, she describes her experience: "He beat me and locked me up for one and a half months in a house. He said, 'If you talk I'll kill you'. I was so afraid that I accepted. Even when I wanted to go to the toilet, he escorted me. He wouldn't let me do anything on my own. He also used force to get me to have sex with him; he tied each of my legs with rope so they were apart. It was every night at midnight."

That this could happen in Somalia, with its "toxic combination of lawlessness, extreme Islamist values that give women no rights, and the shame of lost virginity", may not be too surprising. Elsewhere the signs are perhaps more worrying:

[JW From a simplistic supply-&-demand perspective, the increasingly skewed gender ratios among younger cohorts in China, with more young men looking for wives than there are women to go around, should automatically improve women's situation. Maybe, in some respects and for some women, but not necessarily.]

A shortage of women in China, blamed on people having sex-specific abortions because of the one-child policy, has resulted in men being willing to go to extreme lengths to find a wife. Future grooms pay kidnappers between £120 and £500 to find them a bride. Dealers in wives will often go to Vietnam, where women are a less scarce commodity, capture young women, and smuggle them across the border to their new Chinese "husbands".

With over 30 million excess young males now, the problem can only get worse.