Saturday, May 17, 2014

Editorial: Keep the Internet Open


The Federal Communications Commission is considering a controversial proposal that would allow major Internet service providers, such as Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon, to charge content providers higher rates for faster transmission speeds — effectively ending the government’s commitment to “net neutrality” which offers everybody the same access to the Internet.

The commission should classify broadband as a telecommunications common carrier, which would allow it to continue to prohibit companies from engaging in unjust or unreasonable discrimination. Phone and cable companies as well as their many supporters in Congress oppose that option, and they appear to have moved FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a former cable TV executive, in that direction.

If the FCC allows ISPs to show preference to favored corporate content providers, effectively creating a fast lane for them and a slow lane for the rest of us [as it started the process on May 15], the commission also should clear the way for community broadband networks that would compete with the private carriers who already too often provide substandard service.

At the prompting of the big cable and phone companies, legislators in 20 states have enacted laws limiting cities and towns from building their own broadband networks that would compete with for-profit Internet service providers, and new restrictions have been proposed in Kansas and Utah. Wheeler has said he intends for the commission to exercise its authority to preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband networks.

Speaking at the Cable Show industry conference April 30, Wheeler said, “[F]or many parts of the communications sector, there hasn’t been as much competition as consumers and innovation deserve. Given the high fixed costs and consequent scale economies, this isn’t especially surprising. But that makes it all the more important that we knock down public and private barriers to competition and avoid erecting new ones. It is equally important that we encourage competition wherever it is possible.

“One place where it may be possible is municipally owned or authorized broadband systems. I understand that the experience with community broadband is mixed, that there have been both successes and failures. But if municipal governments — the same ones that granted cable franchises — want to pursue it, they shouldn’t be inhibited by state laws. I have said before, that I believe the FCC has the power — and I intend to exercise that power — to preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband,” Wheeler said, as reported by Jon Brodkin at ArsTechnica.com.

A panel of the US Court of Appeals for D.C. in January ruled that the FCC could enforce net neutrality rules under the Telecommunications Act of 1995, but only if the ISPs were classified as common carriers, not information services, as they were designated in 2005 by George W. Bush’s FCC. Judge Laurence Silberman, who dissented from his fellow judges in the 2-1 decision, wrote that the FCC does have authority under the law to take “measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment.” In a footnote, Silberman wrote that “[a]n example of a paradigmatic barrier to infrastructure investment would be state laws that prohibit municipalities from creating their own broadband infrastructure to compete against private companies.”

Many smaller and mid-sized cities have had difficulty getting their local phone or cable companies to provide broadband service — at least until the communities started building their own community networks. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration reported in May 2013 that almost 100% of urban residents have access to download speeds of at least 6 megabits per second (Mbps), which is suitable for email and other basic Internet service, but only 82% of rural communities can access those speeds. And while almost 88% of urban residents have access to speeds of 25 Mbps, which is more suitable for video streaming and other advanced uses, only 41% of rural residents have the same access. Many Americans lack even basic 3 Mbps broadband.

Edward Wyatt reported in the New York Times Dec. 29, 2013, that the United States is falling dangerously behind other nations in offering high-speed, affordable broadband service to businesses and consumers. The average Internet speed in Riga, Latvia, is at least two and a half times that of San Antonio, Texas, according to Ookla, a research firm that measures broadband speeds around the globe. That means downloading a two-hour movie takes, on average, 35 minutes in San Antonio, and 13 in Riga. And the cost of Riga’s service is about one-fourth that of San Antonio.

Ironically, San Antonio’s city-owned electric utility has installed fiber-optic cable that is used by city officials and could provide low-cost broadband services for the city’s residents, but Texas law prohibits the city from providing the service.

However, Wyatt noted that at least three American cities have such superfast broadband that if they were ranked against foreign countries, Bristol, Va., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Lafayette, La., would rank in the top 10. And those three cities built municipal fiber-optic networks that can operate just as fast as the swiftest connections in Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo.

David Morris, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, said publicly owned telecommunications networks offer lower prices and higher speeds than such giants as Comcast, AT&T and Time Warner. “It is instructive that the first gigabit network was built not by a private company but by Chattanooga, a muni network. Today 40 cities in 13 states have locally owned gigabit networks.”

According to the Institute, more than 400 towns and cities across America have installed or are planning broadband networks.

Among the states that have imposed significant obstacles to communities owning their broadband networks, Morris noted that Nebraska, Nevada, Texas and Missouri have enacted outright bans. Virginia prohibits a city from offering TV unless it can cash flow the first year. Utah prohibits public broadband networks from selling any retail services.

To persuade legislators to inhibit or prohibit muni networks, Morris noted, telecom lobbyists offer two arguments. First they contend that government cannot effectively run a telecom network. When it becomes impossible to ignore the growing empirical evidence to the contrary, they shift gears and pitch without shame an entirely contradictory argument: Cities have an unfair advantage.

“That was the argument Time Warner used in North Carolina after the cities of Wilson and Salisbury successfully demonstrated their telecom competences. It was a bizarre thesis. Time Warner had 15 million subscribers and revenues of $18 billion at the time. Salisbury had 1,000 subscribers and a total municipal budget of $34 million. Nevertheless, North Carolina legislators dutifully voted to effectively prohibit other cities from replicating Salisbury and Wilson’s successful ventures.”

Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, in an op-ed for the New York Times (April 28) noted that her hometown, Santa Monica, Calif., has shifted from paying expensive leases on private communications lines to using its own fiber network, called City Net. Businesses in Santa Monica pay City Net a third of what a private operator would charge and the city government has made millions leasing out its fiber resources at reasonable rates to other providers.

“American cities need fast, cheap, ubiquitous, open fiber networks, and every city has the tools at its disposal to get these networks built. But there are powerful and well-funded incumbents who will fight any mayor brave enough to consider the idea. If you’re furious about your cable bill and worried about net neutrality, go tell city hall,” she wrote.

Legislators should get out of the way of communities that want to provide affordable broadband service and the FCC should encourage competition and keep the Internet open to all. — JMC

(See also "Don't Let Net Neutrality Become Another Broken Promise" by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.)

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2014
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Friday, May 16, 2014

NH town should fire police commissioner who called the President the N-word

By Marc Jampole

Everyone has the right to exercise free speech, except when they are serving as a representative of an organization. As an organizational representative, what you say should hew to the standards and beliefs of the organization.

It’s amazing how many times public language controversies hinge on whether the individual who made the statement was representing him or herself or an organization.  At essence, representing the organization was at the heart of the “Duck Dynasty” and Donald Sterling controversies.  AMC thought Phil Robertson, star of reality show “Duck Dynasty,” was representing the network when he made sexist and then racist statements. If Donald Sterling didn’t represent a professional basketball team, his vilely racist comments would not have made such news.  The National Basketball Association recognized that as an owner Sterling always represented the league and therefore fined him and is trying to force him to sell his team.

Representing the organization is also the case with Wolfeboro, New Hampshire police commissioner Robert Copeland who called President Obama a“nigger.” 

For at least the last 150 years, virtually everyone who speaks English has regarded “nigger” as a term of disparagement, similar to “kike,” “dago” or “frog.”

Some defenders of the use of the term “nigger” point out that calling a white from the rural south a “cracker” is the same thing.  Since one is supposedly “allowed,” why not the other?

This view neglects the historical fact of slavery and the legal and institutional racism that poisoned much of the United States for more than a century after the demise of slavery and still affects the country in negative ways. “Niggers” were chattel that could be sold.  “Niggers” had no control over their own lives.  “Niggers” suffered the physical pains and humiliation of whippings, forced separation of families and rape. “Niggers” were considered genetically and morally inferior creatures who couldn’t take care of themselves, who shunned work and didn’t know how to handle money. “Niggers” were less than human. “Niggers” could be easily fooled since they had the emotions of children. “Niggers” deserve to live in poverty since they don’t know how to work hard. 
That’s what most whites meant when they used the N-word from about 1800 onwards.

Everyone knows that the word “nigger” reflects all these meanings, which makes it a more scurrilous and damaging phrase than other ethnic insults, at least in the United States.  

Even the Afro-American men who use the term with each other as a kind of endearment know that it’s a horrible insult.  Male-bonding often devolves to gentle competitive sparring. I don’t know how many times I have called my male cousins “assholes” or “bozos” to their face, and none got mad, because they knew that my diminishment of them was a form of affection—or perhaps a replacement of the affection that American men are not supposed to display to other men.  The very fact that the word “nigger” is especially harmful and disgusting makes it an ideal choice for male-bonding between Afro-American men.  It doesn’t make the word acceptable in any other context, and certainly not acceptable for whites to use because when whites say “nigger,” it carries all its historical baggage.

Barack Obama is a smooth-talking city slicker who had an outstanding career as a scholar and elected official, and has excelled at everything he ever tried (except being a progressive president).  He shares not a trait with the composite “nigger” that people evoke when they use that word. To call Obama a “nigger” can only be understood as an insult. When Copeland refused to apologize, he said that the President “meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”  He could not have possibly meant anything other than the vilest of insults.

Now Copeland is entitled to his opinion about the President and African-Americans in general, and he has the right to express it.

But he doesn’t have the right to express it as a representative of Wolfeboro.

The simple fact of the matter is that when you are an elected or an appointed official, you pretty much sign on to representing your jurisdiction on a 24/7 basis. Once you become a mayor, Congressperson, police commissioner or judge, you de facto give up some right of speech. So whereas you might be entitled to your opinion and to use language that is inherently insulting, exercising that right will conflict with your public duties and with the image that your jurisdiction wants to maintain. 

Executives of corporations face a similar constraint: if the news media discovered that a chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company said “nigger” during a private dinner party, he would be unable to hide behind his right to free speech. The board of directors would summarily fire her/him. And they would be right to do it.

While no decision has been made yet, I’m guessing that the Wolfeboro township commissioners are going to end up firing Copeland or asking him to resign. They will have no choice. Otherwise, they will be tarred with the same racist brush that has rightfully dirtied their police commissioner. Now that kind of institutional racism might fly in the rural south, but probably not in New England. 

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Colleges across the country show that two wrongs don’t make it right

By Marc Jampole

Across the country, colleges are holding graduation ceremonies for hundreds of thousands of graduates. But what used to be called the graduation season is rapidly gaining a new name: commencement speaker cancellation season.

This year in particular there seems to be a large number of high profile commencement speakers who have backed out or have been disinvited after campus protests. Former Bush II Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced out as Rutgers’ commencement speaker. International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde withdrew from speaking at Smith College after protests.  Former University of California-Berkeley Chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, withdrew from speaking at Haverford after protesters wanted him to apologize for having campus police use batons against Occupy protesters. Brandeis University reversed its decision to award Islamic feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, after previously announcing it would do so, after protests by right-wing Moslems over her criticism of their religion.  Even Michelle Obama changed her mind about going to a Kansas high school graduation after right-wingers protested.

In three of these cases, progressive protesters forced out conservative speakers. In the two other examples, religious radicals forced out moderates who they mistakenly labeled as extremists.

Taken together, these commencement speaker cancellations involve a series of laudable and not-so-laudable actions.  In all examples, we should admire the protesters for exercising their right to make their opinions known. 

But we should be disappointed in and ashamed of the institutions and the prominent individuals who backed down. Protests would have made for messy commencements, which are usually drawn out affairs that involve a lot of sophisticated choreography to move thousands of graduates on to and off the stage in a short amount of time. But so what, life is messy and democracy is messy.  By backing down or backing out, the individuals and institutions demonstrated a lack of respect for public discourse. 

While we can admire organizations such as the New York Public Library that back down when it turns out their plans are not in the public’s best interests, giving a speaker a platform is never an occasion for backing down. Instead, the institutions could expand the venue—for example, getting another speaker to balance the controversial speaker or creating a special forum to discuss the controversies during commencement week.  The colleges could even give the protesters 10 minutes at the ceremonies to make their points. 

To the degree that the speakers themselves made the decision to withdraw, they should be ashamed of themselves. They took the actions that made them controversial. They should own what they did or repudiate it. They should not run away from a spotlight that they themselves created.

For some of the educational institutions in question, backing down from the original plan marks their second mistake. Their first was to invite the speaker in the first place.

Let’s start with Birgeneau: To invite an obscure university administrator known for one action only is an open endorsement of that action. Haverford officials were stating that they thought it was right to beat up peaceful Occupy protesters. No wonder faculty and staff mobilized against the decision to ask Birgeneau to speak.  

The case of Condoleezza is also easy: Commencement speakers are supposed to send graduates off on the journey that will be the rest of their lives with hopeful advice that spurs their enthusiasms and aspirations. The commencement speaker thus carries a certain moral authority.  How can anyone who was associated with the decision to create a world-wide network of torture facilities be considered a moral authority? Rice, Cheney, Bush II, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, David Addington and anyone else who was involved in deciding to pursue torture as an instrument of war should be American pariahs. No university invited Joseph McCarthy or Roy Cohn to speak after their disgrace and none should invite these international criminals, either.

Some would argue that Christine Lagarde is also a war criminal by virtue of her activities as head of the IMF. I would agree that many IMF actions have hurt people while protecting the interests of banks. It’s a political argument between left and right.  Lagarde’s politics do not in and of themselves forfeit her the moral right to be a commencement speaker, as the actions of Condoleezza Rice and Robert Birgeneau do.

The case of Brandeis University is the trickiest. On the surface, there is nothing morally objectionable in Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s actions and statements. She has fought for years against female genital mutilation and formed an organization, the AHA Foundation, whose mission is to work “to protect and reinforce the basic rights and freedoms of women and girls, including security and control of their own bodies, access to an education, the ability to work outside the home and control their own income, freedom of expression and association, and the myriad other basic civil rights defined under the laws of Western democracies and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The fact that she is a fellow of the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute is troubling, but I can see why any mainstream organization would want to demonstrate its commitment to human rights by awarding Ali an honorary degree.

Except that Brandeis is not any mainstream organization. It is a Jewish organization giving an award to a woman who is disrupting Islam. Yes, we should support her disruptions, just as we support the disruptions that pro-choice and supporters of LGBT marriage make to the Christian and Catholic religious institutions and belief.  But when Brandeis does it, it carries stark and obvious symbolism, because it’s as if a Jewish organization is taunting Islamists, purposely getting their goat.  It plays into the myths that many right-wing Moslems have about Jews. 

Someone—actually a lot of people—at Brandeis must have known that giving an honorary degree to Ali would piss off the Islamic right wing, which makes the withdrawal of the degree particularly obnoxious and cowardly. If you are going to stir the pot, don’t wimp out, which is what Brandeis has done.  

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Another Subprime Mess

Infographic by Kevin Kreneck
Click on art to enlarge

Monday, May 12, 2014

If comic strips are an indication breakfast in bed is out for moms on Mother’s Day

By Marc Jampole

As in 2012, I thought I would analyze Mother’s Day this year through the lens of the Sunday comics.  And what a difference two years makes! 

For one thing, two years ago I looked at all 20 comics printed in the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This year I looked at a semi-random 30 comics of the total of more than 70 on the Yahoo! Comics web page; those 30 included most of the 20 I remembered from the Post-Gazette.

Judging from the results of the two surveys, Mother’s Day is not as important as it used to be. Two years ago, 50% of all comics had a Mother’s Day theme.  This year, it was down to one-third. Even family-centered comic strips such as “Momma,” “Fox Trot” and “Family Tree” avoided the holiday.

In analyzing the topics of Mother’s Day comics two years ago, I found that half of them—or 25% of all cartoons that day—focused on bringing mother breakfast in bed. I concluded that breakfast in bed had become the standard practice for this manufactured holiday. Perhaps it was just a fad, because this year, not a single strip I saw depicted other family members preparing and serving mother bed in breakfast.

The interesting thing about breakfast in bed is that the act of preparation and serving doesn’t involved extra consumer purchases (since breakfast typically consists of foods always in the frig).  This lack of consumerism made Mother’s Day unlike other holidays, which tend to reduce to buying and giving gifts. 

While the breakfast in bed is missing from this year’s comics, so is consumerism for the most part. True, “Arlo & Janis” creates an emotional competition between the husband giving jewelry and a phone call from a far away son. The “Peanuts” rerun details the act of selecting a card, part of the buying process.

But most of the strips focus on serving, words of appreciation and things one can make or do to show mother the love:
·         Doing chores for mom (“B.C.”)
·         Giving flowers (“Luann”)
·         Gathering flowers and making a card (“Nancy”)
·         Mom reversing roles and doing everything for the child (“Cathy”)
·         Mom getting drunk at a multi-family barbecue (“Stone Soup”)
·         The magic mirror on the wall calling mother the fairest of them all (“Wizard of Id”)
·         How we love mom’s nagging (“Drabble”)
·         Mother and daughter spending the day together, bicycling on the street (“Jump Start”)

Note that the food service takes place at home—in the kitchen or backyard. No restaurants.

So even as comic strip moms are denied the pleasure of breakfast in bed, their families are nonetheless giving more of themselves in a direct way and depending less on engaging in commercial transactions as the means to celebrate the holiday and express their emotions.

This turn to the virtues of interaction and investment of self that we see in comics may or may not reflect a change in society. Depending on which report you read, Mother’s Day spending will be either up or down this year in the aggregate. Per capita spending will go down by $5. Yet even at the low end, Americans will spend more on Mother’s Day than any other holiday but Christmas. But they spend on very few things: one study reports that people mostly give their moms traditional gifts of a card (81.3 percent), flowers (66.6 percent) or a nice meal out (56.5 percent). The first two predominate in the cartoon world. 

Mother’s Day has thus not been privatized into a holiday that exists only within families. It still finds expression in the economic realm. People still interact with the rest of the world in the planning and implementation of holiday plans, and they interact the way they know best—by making a purchase that represents an emotion. 

News media finally pays attention to problem they helped to create—infantilization of adults

By Marc Jampole

The American news media may finally be starting to cover a trend that they helped to create—the infantilization of American adults.

The infantilized adult continues the pursuits, hobbies, predilections, opinions and thought processes of youth instead of growing into mature, adult pursuits and activities.  Reading Harry Potter and comic books, playing with Legos or My Little Pony dolls, collecting action hero paraphernalia, spending much of their free time playing video games, vacationing at Disney resorts and amusement parks—these are all signs that an adult is wallowing in callow youth instead of growing up.  The mass media has of course glorified each and every one of the trends which together are creating the infantilized American adult. 

For years, American comedy movies in particular have celebrated adults who refuse to grow up. The “Harold & Kumar” movies,  “Old School,” “Big,” “Grandma’s Boy,” “Ted,” “The Wedding Crashers,” “Billy Madison,” “You, Me and Dupree,” “Dodgeball,””Step Brothers,” “The 40-year-old Virgin,” “Knocked Up,” all three “Hangovers,” the “Jackass” movies, “Bridesmaids,” “Hall Pass” and “Identity Thief”—this off the top of my head list doesn’t even scratch the surface of the multitude of movies released over the past 20 years centered on men and women who refuse to grow up.

Now A.O. Scott, a New York Times film critic has realized that staying a child is a major theme of American comedy films. 

Scott announces his discovery in his review of “Neighbors,” which explores the trick-filled feud between a suburban couple who retain an adolescent lifestyle and the unruly fraternity that moves next door.

He really does nail the current state of American comedy, so I want to give an extended quote:
“The central problem in American film comedy for the past 15 years or so — let’s say from middle-period Sandler through prime Apatow and late ‘Hangover’ — has been maturity, or, more precisely, its avoidance. In the old days, adulthood was a fact. Now it’s a vague, unproven theory. Adolescence used to represent constraint and frustration, to be left behind as quickly as possible. For the heroes of the New American Comedy, it represents a blissful state of hedonistic freedom, to be held onto for as long as possible.

“How to stay a child when the world expects otherwise — and how to make the world love you anyway — has usually been, in these movies, a male predicament. Women have been sirens or mommies, on hand to inflame the boys’ desires or soothe their fears. This has begun to change recently, although mainly on television, where shows like ‘Girls’ and ‘Broad City’ have extended the privileges of arrested development on a more or less equal-opportunity basis.”

It’s not Scott’s job to put the tide of comedies about adults remaining children into a broader social context, but it’s clear to me that these movies both reflect the cultural shift and help to shape it.  In most of these movies, the immature heroes and heroines grow up a little bit in the end, but these movies are not cautionary tales about arrested development.  No, they all glorify and endorse infantilization—it’s much more fun than behaving as an adult.

When you add the number of these comedies about men and women remaining boys and girls to the number of fantasy superhero movies, the conclusion is clear: Hollywood is dedicated to promoting the perpetual adolescence lifestyle to the American public.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Article claims to tell us what rich people believe but is really telling us what they want us to believe

By Marc Jampole

U.S. News & World Report is fronting another article that purports to tell us how rich people think. As with other articles of this ilk, “7 Things Rich People Believe” reduces to a series of ideological beliefs presented as facts.  In the article, the writer doesn’t even attempt to justify his assertions about the minds of rich folks. No studies, not even an anecdote—just a series of wishes, assumptions and stale advice, all tinged with the ideology of greed and consumerism. 

As it turns out, the writer is Tom Sightings, who I have chided before for his ideologically tinged and accuracy challenged articles that advocate that big cities are not good for retirement and that people should move to avoid paying school taxes once their kids are out of school. Sightings seems to specialize in advocating the politics of selfishness in cute, homey articles that render general advice that always seems to be the same pabulum extolling greed, consumerism and the belief that the rich are better people.

The article opens by asserting that most people both love and hate money—like it but believe it’s evil to be greedy. Sightings then exhorts us to “get beyond your mixed feelings about money and start thinking like a rich person.”

And what does Sightings say a rich person think about money?  That it’s not evil. That there’s nothing wrong with wanting more of it. And that you (the rich person) deserve to have it. Those three thoughts proffered by Sightings are all permissions to be greedy. For example, he never considers that it might be wrong for a billionaire to want more money or that people should feel ashamed to display enormous wealth when others are starving or struggling.  Consider this statement: “The wealthy are not inherently dishonest; they do not feel ashamed of their first-class lifestyle or their bulging portfolios. In fact, most rich people take pride in their accomplishments and enjoy the fruits of their labors.”  What these two sentences are really saying is that 1) the only sign of success is making money; 2) the only way to take pride in your accomplishments is to spend money; and 3) all rich people earn their wealth (meaning they deserve it).  These are all basics principles of the American consumer ideology, hammered into us daily by the news media, our civic leaders and mass entertainment.  But nowhere does Sightings prove that any of these statements are true.

To these general ideological beliefs, Sighting adds an out and out lie: that the way to achieve real wealth is to earn more, not save more.  Tell that to all the trust fund babies; the inexperienced kids who go to the front of the line for jobs because of their rich parents’ connections; or those born millionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Mitt Romney who leveraged their parents’ wealth into multi-millions or billions.  All studies suggest that the best way to achieve wealth is to be born into wealth. Now maybe Sightings is right that rich people believe the lie that the road to riches runs through your job—but I don’t think Sightings ever asked, and it’s convenient that it’s what rich folk who don’t want to pay a lot of taxes would want us to believe.

Sightings completes his list of what rich folk think with some of the more common business success tips that we’ve heard since the days of Dale Carnegie and before: Rely on brainwork. Live below your means. Spend more on education and less on entertainment. Like all writers on business success, though, when Sightings says “education,” he really means vocational training. “Yet these people typically do not put a lot of faith in formal education or fancy degrees. They focus on useful, practical skills that are relevant to their career.” In Sightings world, you won’t catch a rich person reading Plato or Proust, studying environmental science or contemplating the lessons of Chinese history.

Articles claiming or inferring that rich people think differently and those giving tips on how to think like a rich person pop up in the mass business media about every six weeks. All build their case on assumptions and anecdotes. All happily support the status quo.

These lists of what the rich think or how they differ from others always communicate three hidden messages:
1.      There is one route to success, which, of course, is to buy into the American ideology of selfishness and consumerism.
2.      Rich people deserve to be rich, and that their wealth does not depend on luck, connections, prior wealth or the accidents of birth.
3.      Everyone can become rich. All you have to do is think and act like a rich person.

The flip side of the third message is that when you don’t become rich, it’s your fault. You didn’t work as hard as that investment banker (even if you worked as many hours in your job as a janitor). You didn’t get enough training, or the wrong kind of training (I guess that associates degree was a mistake—too bad you didn’t have the bucks for Harvard!). You didn’t have the right attitude or the right thought process. Maybe you stayed poor because in your heart you didn’t like yourself enough to get rich.  Whatever, it’s all your own fault.

These articles purporting to analyze the wealthy thus serve to enforce the American ideology—to make us like the wealthy and not resent them, to make us want to be like them and to accept their version of what’s best for society.

Just the kind of stuff that rich people—those who own the media and advertise on it want—want us to believe.  

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Is the U.S. giving up its support of the rule of law?

By Marc Jampole

Note: I’m giving over today’s blog to distinguished anti-death penalty attorney, Marshall Dayan.  Here’s what Marshall has to say about the rule of law in contemporary America:

Americans are rightfully proud of our historical leadership when it comes to support of the rule of law: this idea that the law prevails and that our independent judicial system will apply the law to all in a fair and consistent manner.

But a number of events over the past few weeks make me wonder if the rule of law is losing some of its vitality in the United States.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently told law students at the University of Tennessee that they should think about revolting if taxes get too high.  He did not recommend that those opposed to high taxes organize politically and elect representatives who would reduce high taxes. He suggested that they consider a revolt. 

In Nevada, a rancher, Cliven Bundy, has refused to pay grazing fees for grazing his cattle on federal land for the past twenty years.  16,000 other western cattle ranchers graze their cattle on federal lands, and they pay grazing fees for doing so.  Bundy has outspokenly rejected the authority of the federal government and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to charge him grazing fees, asserting that the land belonged to the State of Nevada.  The federal court rejected this argument and ordered him to pay the fees.  The court also found him to be trespassing on federal law in the absence of payment.  Bundy became a libertarian cause célèbre by defying the court’s orders requiring him to pay the grazing fees.  (His image became tarnished when he revealed himself to be a blatant racist, ironically chastising impoverished African-Americans for availing themselves of federal government economic programs while he abused government resources for his own economic advantage.)  Rather than enforce the court’s orders, BLM backed down, at least temporarily, in the face of armed resisters who have gathered in Bunkerville, Nevada to defend Bundy’s continued illegal grazing on federal lands.

In both cases, federal officials—Justice Scalia and BLM—have weakened the concept of the rule of law.

Another example of abandoning the rule of law came when the Supreme Court of Oklahoma recently issued a stay of execution to protect its jurisdictional right to decide whether an Oklahoma statute barring the revelation of the manufacturer of drugs for lethal injection violated the state constitution. After the court ruled, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin defied the court’s stay order.  She issued an executive order scheduling two executions for April 29, 2014.  In issuing her executive order, Governor Fallin wrongfully argued that the Oklahoma Supreme Court had acted beyond its constitutional authority and therefore she would not follow its order.  As an aside, Oklahoma badly botched the first of two attempted executions. The condemned prisoner, Clayton Lockett, died of a heart attack forty three minutes after the lethal injection failed.  Governor Fallin then delayed the execution of the other prisoner, Charles Warner.

Our second President John Adams supposedly coined the phrase, "a government of laws, and not of men.” Adams believed that while all people are fallible, we strive to create rules to be applied fairly and consistently.  This idea comes directly from the Hebrew Bible.  Leviticus 19:15 commands, "You shall not render an unfair decision: do not favor the poor or show deference to the rich; judge your neighbor fairly.”

There will always be disputes about the boundaries of government power. An independent judiciary is necessary to settle these disputes.  Without it, we run the risk of devolving into chaos.  In United States v. United Mine Workers, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that “[t]here can be no free society without law administered through an independent judiciary. If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.”

Political differences are healthy, and are to be wrestled with in a democratic republic.  But courts must remain independent, and must be honored and respected by people of good will on all sides of all issues, or we risk losing our democratic republic to a tyranny of raw power. The recent statements and decisions by the Justice Scalia, the BLM and Governor Fallin undercut this basic principle of American rule of law.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Supreme Court makes a major mistake by allowing Christian prayers before public meetings

By Marc Jampole

I’m still flabbergasted at the naiveté—or perhaps lack of experience in the world—displayed by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion upholding the right of upstate New York government officials to say Christian prayers before town meetings.

Kennedy writes that the case comes down to whether people are offended by the prayers. His widely quoted words are 1,000% wrong: “Adults often encounter speech they find disagreeable…Legislative bodies do not engage in impermissible coercion merely by exposing constituents to prayer they would rather not hear and in which they need not participate.” 

Maybe he should have asked Jews, Muslims or atheists what they feel.  I’m quite certain that many, if not most, will tell you that they feel oppressed and assaulted by prayers that invoke Christ or a Christian god at a public or government meeting. Many also feel angry and betrayed by those allowing and enabling prayers for one religion in what is supposed to be a secular and diverse society.

I personally have encountered maybe 20 situations in my life in which clergy or lay people have offered public prayers for one religion—always a form of Christianity—at a public event.  And every single time, I have complained, usually joined by others.  Why? A combination of a deep feeling of oppression and an understanding that we live in a secular society.

My earliest example was when the coach of my high school football team in Miami, Florida, would ask a member of the clergy to give a prayer before every game. The clergy were mostly Christian, with an occasional rabbi; it was long before the days of Islamic or Buddhist awareness. The prayers were almost always quite ecumenical, with some clergymen not even mentioning a deity. But one time, a preacher invoked Christ several times. The three Jewish members of the team (the other two of whom made All City; I was a scrub) hit the roof. We felt so angry and betrayed by our coach, an otherwise wonderful man, Frank Downey, who had actually played on the same high school football team as my father years before. Coach Downey made sure it never happened again.

When you are different from the majority or from what is considered the social norm, it always feels a little bit like you don’t really belong, whether you a different color, a different nationality or a different religion. The majority culture impinges on everything—think of the hype and the displays of Christmas season, of the Christian holidays that have become national holidays like St. Valentine’s Day or All Hallow’s Eve or of the many times politicians talk about their Christian faith. Imagine being a Moslem and trying to explain to your children why you don’t exchange presents the morning of December 25.

Luckily, our constitution and the first amendment guarantee religious freedom and a secular society. I personally believe that a correct reading of the Constitution would prohibit every type of prayer before government meetings, let alone prayer to a specific deity.

I suggest that Justice Kennedy try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes for a few hours.  He might change his mind about what he considers to be coercive or oppressive.

Someday we will get a Supreme Court which is dedicated to interpreting the Constitution and not to completing the Reagan right-wing agenda. Maybe then, this awful Supreme Court decision will be reversed.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Law dean rationale for making insider trading legal would allow murder, theft & anything else bad people do

By Marc Jampole

It seems as if the bad idea of the week always shows up on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.

This week it’s the idea that insider trading of stocks should be legal, proffered by Henry Manne, dean emeritus of the George Mason University School of Law in an article titled “Busting Insider Trading: As Pointless as Prohibition.” 

Mann’s reasoning is that as in the case of the prohibition of drinking alcohol in effect in the United States from 1920-1934, the law against insider trading doesn’t stop people from doing it. If people are still going to do it, it might as well be legal.

By Manne’s reasoning, murder, theft, incest, rape and every other crime might as well be legal, since people are still going to do it.

We all know, however, that if murder, theft or illegal trading were legal, instead of just a few sociopaths doing it, a large number of people would. I don’t think Manne would advocate making murder legal.

The difference between Prohibition and these crimes—and insider trading—is the difference between “who cares” and “it’s wrong.” It’s not wrong to drink alcohol and is never was except to snoopy moralists. Nor does drinking alcohol hurt anyone except for the drinker, except when that drinker does something stupid like drive or give it to minors, which are still against the law.  

But it is wrong and unethical to buy and sell stocks based on information that the general public doesn’t have yet. It also hurts other people, especially when the insider is selling a stock that’s about to go into the tank. Near the end of his article, Manne makes the outrageous claim that insider trading does no harm and can have significant social and economic benefits.  Of course he never says what those benefits are. That’s because there are none. Insider trading has been illegal since 1934 because it is unfair and it allows the insider to profit unfairly. It is akin to getting an extra out in baseball or starting on third base. I know that a lot of Wall Street insiders did start on third base and think they hit a triple, but that sense of privilege often held by the moneyed —so many of whom are the bankers and executives who obtain the most insider information—should not and does not legally extend to special treatment as an investor.
Manne hides the lunacy of his argument behind an extended simile—the comparison of the FBI tracking bootleggers and other gangsters and the efforts of Manhattan federal prosecutor Preet Bharara to go after insider traders such as Stephen A. Cohen’s firm.  He spends a goodly number of words glorifying Elliott Ness, only to point out that Ness’ gallant activities led nowhere, since prohibition was repealed. His analogy is bogus not only because insider trading can’t be compared to drinking alcohol, but because the focal point of the comparison—Eliott Ness—didn’t really get much done. His reputation is mostly manufactured by the “untouchable” television series and movies.  In real life, he was pretty mediocre, although he did help gather evidence that put gangster Al Capone away—on charges of tax evasion!

I suppose there is some consistency in creating a false comparison in which one of the objects under comparison is also false.

Whenever I see articles like this one, I wonder why a major newspaper—and specifically the Wall Street Journal—would publish them. I know that Manne has a big name in legal circles as an emeritus dean and as a legal theoretician. His big idea—to use economics to analyze legal problems—certainly fits into the Journal’s bailiwick.  But a crackpot idea is a crackpot idea.

Monday, April 28, 2014

British Lord puts a happy face on environmental degradation and resource shortages

By Marc Jampole

One of the most powerful rhetorical devices is to cherry pick your criteria to get the result you want.  We see a classic example of it in “The Scarcity Fallacy,” the lead essay in the Wall Street Journal’s “Review” section this week. Author Matt Ridley, a member of the British House of Lords, says that “ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.”

Lord Ridley’s logical fallacy, which animates his rhetorical trickery, is that he refers only to the human race over the past 10,000 some odd years of recorded history. If he looked either closer or longer term, he might not conclude that we have always overcome resource shortages so we will in the future.

The Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset once said that the best point of view from which to look at history is where you can just make out the warts on Cleopatra’s nose. Detail, but not so close that all you see is detail.  Ortega believed this theoretical sweet spot reveals overarching truths.

Here’s an extreme example of the impact of measurement parameters on conclusions: In evaluating the greatest center fielders of all time, baseball numbers guru Bill James noted that he usually used the best five years of a career as a major criterion and by this measurement Mickey Mantle beat Ty Cobb, but if he had measured the best 4, 6, 7 or 8 years, Cobb would win. 

In Ridley’s case, he’s measuring all of humanity over 10,000 years.

But what if he looked more closely? He would find that a number of human societies and cultures have disappeared because of resource depletion: the American Indians at Cahokia, the Pacific Islanders on Rapa Nui, the ancient Minoans on Crete, the citizens of Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley, to name a few.

Ridley could have also taken a wide lens and looked at the 3.6 billion year history of life on earth, or even the 200 million years since mammals first emerged. In both these cases, one of the big lessons of history is that the overwhelming majority of species will eventually become extinct, as they fail to adapt to the ever-transforming environment on Earth.

The danger in Ridley’s conclusion that we’ll figure it out because we have always figured it out in the past is that everyone who says it, including Ridley, uses it to justify a laissez faire approach that lets the marketplace determine how we meet the resource depletion challenges that we face. In fact, if we are to survive as a species, we need to look at things in a new way and organize societies in new ways. Many are working to save human beings from extinction, for example the scientists researching planets that have living conditions similar to Earth’s. These scientists know that our sun’s ever-intensifying heat will evaporate all the water on the earth in about a billion years, so we have to find another place to live before then. The work of these scientists requires public support and public support requires higher taxes, something that lassiez-fairenistas never like. Note, too, that Ridley applauds fracking as an example of human ingenuity that shows we’ll overcome every resource shortage. Well, maybe not the shortage of clean air and water that fracking causes. 

Ridley also thinks that large parts of the world haven’t yet been introduced to fertilizer and other advanced agricultural techniques, which seems to be a meager proof that we won’t run out of food. Not only that, he lauds the positive influence on the environment that humans have because birds and other animals often carry fertilizer used on crops to the forests. The article presents the world as seen through the rose-colored glasses of a true believer in technology controlled by private interests.

Ridley is so busy shoveling fertilizer about fertilizer that he ignores the real degradations we are inflicting on our planet and the real threat of resource depletion to our future well-being. His complacent and smug self-satisfaction with the human race will no doubt make many breathe a sigh of relief and go about their business using resource profligately. After all, we’ve always muddled through before.

And so did the stegosaurus, until it didn’t.

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Editorial: Open College To All


The Supreme Court, in another split verdict, on April 22 ruled 6-2 that it’s OK if The People decide that they no longer need to take positive steps to make their universities look like the population at large.

“There is no authority in the Constitution of the United States or in this Court’s precedents for the Judiciary to set aside Michigan laws that commit this policy determination to the voters,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the controlling plurality opinion in the case of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. Kennedy added, “This case is not about how the debate about racial preferences should be resolved. It is about who may resolve it.”

Kennedy was joined by Justice Sam Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, who previously wrote glibly, in a 2007 case striking down school integration efforts in Washington and Kentucky, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, but suggested that they’d rather throw out racial preferences altogether.

Justice Steven Breyer crossed over from the liberal side to concur with the conservative majority, although he didn’t adopt their reasoning. He said “the Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a vigorous dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Ginsburg, that said the Constitution requires special vigilance in light of the history of slavery, Jim Crow laws and “recent examples of discriminatory changes to state voting laws.” She said the Michigan ban actually gives minorities less power to affect the political process than others, rolling back the impact of previous US Supreme Court rulings protecting the right specifically of Michigan universities to use affirmative action. (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself from the case.)

In 2003, the Supreme Court had ruled that the University of Michigan could implement an affirmative action policy. That helped the university get black enrollment up to 6.4% of the freshman class in 2006, compared with 14.3% of the state’s population. That same year, Michigan voters approved a ballot initiative that banned the university from basing its admissions considerations on race or sex. In the following six years, black enrollment fell 30% at the undergraduate and law schools, according to Bloomberg News. In 2012, black enrollment was down to 4.6%.

If conservatives truly were interested in a race-neutral admissions program that would give the same opportunities to black and other minority students that they give to whites, the policy could be crafted, but we see very little good faith in their opposition to affirmative action programs.

The University of Texas also is being sued for its affirmative action policy that grants admission to applicants who graduated in the top 10% of their high school class but also considers race for students who aren’t in the top 10%. Its 2013 freshmen class included 5% blacks (compared with 11.6% of the state’s population), 20% Asian (4.1% statewide), 23% Hispanic (38.2% statewide) and 46% white (44.4% statewide). In UT’s law school, which gives points to minority applicants for diversity, enrollment is 4.7% black, 5.6% Asian, 15.7% Hispanic and 60.8% white. The Supreme Court in June 2013 sent the Fisher case back to the Fifth Circuit US Court of Appeals for a rehearing on whether the university’s admissions program is “narrowly tailored to obtain the educational benefits of diversity.”

White resentment of affirmative action for minorities is one of the main wedge issues that the plutocrats use to split the working class, who ought to recognize their common cause: A bigger barrier to minorities as well as working-class whites who aspire to a college degree is the rising cost of a college education.

Until about two decades ago, a commitment to higher education at the state level ensured that college tuition remained within reach for most middle-class families, and financial aid helped lower-income students afford the costs of college.

Texans used to be proud that university costs were kept low enough that the children of working-class parents could pursue a college education. In 1970, when Rick Perry attended Texas A&M, the state paid 85% of the cost of running the college. Tuition and fees for the regular workload of 15 hours was $104 per semester for Texas residents in 1970. (A student could work that off in just 65 hours at the minimum wage of $1.60 per hour.)

After Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he targeted higher education funding and ended up cutting Pell grants and excluded middle-class students from the program. He limited the grants to lower-income families, which made it easier for Congress to cut the program further. Reagan also cut low-interest student loans and restricted eligibility for them. He phased out Social Security survivors’ education benefits, which provided one-fifth of student aid in 1981. Republicans at the state level also reduced their commitment to keeping higher education affordable for the working class.

Now Texas pays less than 15% of college costs and in 2012 the average cost for a semester was $7,533 (the equivalent of 1,039 hours at the minimum wage of $7.25). Today it costs more than $25,000 a year for a Texas resident to attend the University of Texas and it can easily cost more than $100,000 to earn a degree — and it costs more in graduate school.

Robert Hiltonsmith and Tamara Draut reported for Demos.org in March that tuition paid 44% of operating expenses for colleges and universities in 2012. That’s up from 20% 25 years earlier. Federal Pell grants once covered $7 of every $10 in college costs, today it covers only $3 of every $10 needed to attend a public college or university. More than seven out of 10 college seniors now borrow to pay for college and graduate with an average of $29,400 in debt. Student loan debt is now more than $1.2 trillion, twice as much as in 2007 and substantial enough to affect the economy as indebted graduates find it harder to buy a home or car.

States should restore their appropriations so that college once again is affordable to students working no more than 20 hours a week. At the current minimum wage, that means tuition should be no more than $3,625 a semester (or $7.250 a year).

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has proposed that the government lend money to university students at the same rate that the Federal Reserve offers the nation’s banks — currently less than 1%. The federal government should not be making a profit off our college students — as it does under the current student loan rate of 3.86% for undergraduates and 5.4% for graduate students, which generated $41.3 billion in profits last year and is expected to generate $127 billion over the next 11 years, the Congressional Budget Office reported in April. Congress last year reduced the federal unsubsidized loan interest rate to 3.86% for undergraduates, but older loans are at higher rates. Warren wants students with loans at higher rates to be able to refinance them at the lower rates.

Warren would pay for the difference by enacting the “Buffett rule,” named after billionaire Warren Buffett, a minimum tax on income in excess of $1 million, which would raise $50 billion in revenue and ensure that millionaires do not pay lower tax rates than middle-class families, as is often the case today.

On the other side, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s latest budget, which passed the House on a party-line vote, would cut another $90 billion from Pell grants and start charging students interest while they’re still in school.

Congress should adopt Sen. Warren’s proposal to offer student loans at cost and adopt the Buffett rule to establish a minimum tax on millionaires to help restore Pell grants for middle-class families. Congress also should increase the minimum wage so that students can pay for their college education with a part-time job. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2014
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Selections from the May 15, 2014 issue






DISPATCHES
IRS targeted left groups more aggressively than teabaggers;
Bundy’s ‘rights’ aren’t that ancestral;
Texas A.G. wants his own range war with BLM;
Senate still a tossup;
Landrieu aims at ‘Jindal gap’;
Right-wing talkers get payments from con groups;
Controversial Alaska initiatives pushed to general election ballot;
CBO: Medicaid better deal for states than originally predicted;
GOP will block Medicaid expansion to the last man;
GOP govs attack criminal defense lawyers — except their own;
Sickened family awarded $3M in fracking case;
Windmills relatively safe for birds;
Plenty of blame, no action in fertilizer blast probe;
Strike wins UAW recognition;
Gas exports drive higher US prices;
GOP mum on Earth Day;
Superfund site now home to solar farm;
Oklahoma will penalize solar panel installers;
Marijuana goes from poison to medicine;
No, Obama couldn't have been LBJ;
Left challenge could complicate Cuomo re-election ...

JOEL D. JOSEPH
What’s wrong with General Motors?

BOB BURNETT
War on democracy: SCOTUS weighs in







Friday, April 25, 2014

Latest right-wing hero little more than a scofflaw—& now it turns out he’s also a racist

By Marc Jampole 

How Cliven Bundy became a hero to the right-wing is beyond me.

Bundy is the rancher who has refused to pay fees to graze his cattle on public lands for more than 20 years. As the New York Times noted, 16,000 other ranchers pay the fees, which are considered fairly cheap. But even the typical corporate giveaway involving federal government assets isn’t good enough for Bundy. Not only did he refuse to pay the nominal fees; when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rangers recently tried to confiscate 500 head of his cattle, he organized 50 supporters, some armed with handguns and rifles, to chase off them off. No one from the feds has come calling since then. Right-wing commentators and elected officials, including Rand Paul, have praised Bundy and his gumption to stand up to the evil federal government. 

My question is why?

There is no doubt that Bundy has the appropriate atmospherics to be a right-wing cause célèbre: He’s a gun-toting cowboy who is defying the federal government and his views on abortion and minorities are in line with other conservatives.

But strip away the theatre and you are left with a long-term scofflaw with no redeeming case to make for himself.

He broke the law and right-wingers are supposed to support law and order.

Part of the right-wing program has always been to replace taxes on wealth and income with usage taxes. For decades conservatives have mouthed pieties about closing loopholes as opposed to raising taxes.  All the expression “closing loopholes” means is to make people pay their fair share. Clearly, Bundy is not paying his fair share of the fees that clearly substitute for taxes on others.

And let’s not forget about the issue of property. Right-wingers place property above life itself.  Right-wingers want to remove constraints on private property such as environmental and safety regulations.  They uphold the right of someone to use a firearm to injure others in defense of property every time some trigger happy George Zimmerman or Michael Dunn kills a young black male.

Respect for the property of others and the cardinal importance of property rights are foundations of right-wing political theory. And yet they ignore the fact that Bundy is not respecting the property of others. That the property belongs to all of us shouldn’t matter, except to those who believe that the collective entry known as government should not hold property.  These folks should imagine that the grazing lands were private. Bundy and the 16,000 other ranchers who haven’t defied the government would all be paying grazing fees—likely much higher than now—to an individual or a corporation. Right-wingers would clearly not rise in defense of someone who was poaching on the private property of another. In fact, the right wing would support the idea that the property owners could shoot Bundy and his ranchers as soon as they trespassed onto the land in question. 

So how can the right-wing support him?

After the retreat of the BLM rangers, Good ol’ boy Cliven (or is that Cloven?) must have been feeling his oats, because in a Times interview, he came out against abortion and made some very obnoxious comments about African-Americans. He said that he remembers driving by a public-housing project in Las Vegas and seeing “at least a half-dozen (black) people sitting on the porch, they didn’t have nothing to do. Because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?  They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton….And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn't get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

As to be expected, the same Republican Senators who supported Bundy are backing away now that he is expressing overt racism.

The Obama Administration has come away looking craven again, just as it does in all its negotiations with Republicans over budget issues.  Once again Obama appears to be capitulating to the right wing.

Instead of backing off, BLM should have notified the Department of Justice and gotten some help and a lot of firepower. President Obama should have made sure that the BLM returned to the site with hundreds of armed agents, helicopters in the air and tanks. It should have given Bundy’s supporters amply time to stand down and leave with their guns. Then they should have taken the cattle by force.  

There is no doubt that an assault on Bundy’s position would create a lot of negative publicity for the President, especially in the very unlikely event that someone were killed or injured; it’s far more likely that faced with a superior force, the ragtag army Bundy put together would dissipate. No matter, the right would excoriate Obama.  Some would point out that the president is more willing to take arms against his own countrymen than Russia—a scurrilous and unpatriotic accusation since there is absolutely no support for putting U.S. troops into Ukraine. There is no doubt that some votes would be lost in the fall, especially since it’s likely the news media would jump on the forcible taking of Bundy’s cattle as another reason why the Democrats can’t win in November.

But I say, so what! The job of the President of the United States is not to get reelected or to help his party‘s nominees get elected. The president’s job is to uphold the laws of the United States. Giving into Bundy will just embolden others who have no respect of the laws of the United States to try similar stunts. 

Monday, April 21, 2014

WSJ opinion page is the hot spot for intellectuals who sell out to right-wing money

By Marc Jampole

Michael A. Carvin, Yaakov M. Roth and Michael Saltsman have a lot in common.  All three are highly educated and learned white males who work for professional services firms as knowledge workers dedicated to both written and unwritten sets of ethics and professional conduct. All three generally serve corporate clients with right-wing interests.  All have written articles that appeared on the same opinion page on the same day in the Wall Street Journal. Both of their articles (Carvin and Roth work as a team) propose public policies that while, disastrous for the country, would help their clients.

One more thing they have in common: Their articles depend upon fallacious reasoning.

Saltsman is no newcomer to the opinion pages of right-wing media. He is rapidly becoming notorious for his specious reasoning and empty rhetoric in a slew of articles arguing against the minimum wage. He identifies himself as research director at the Employment Policies Institute, but an on-line biography lists him as an employee of Richard Berman, whose public relations agency specializes in creating pseudo think tanks to spew out white papers favorable to his clients—generally large businesses.  But Carvin and Roth, both lawyers at the mega-enormous international law firm Jones Day, are new to the game of misrepresenting facts and using fallacious reasoning in the news media to support their client’s position. They may do it in the court room and during negotiations all the time—I’m not in a position to comment.

Let’s take a look at what these intellectual sell-outs are proposing:

In “Courts Should Stay Out of Political Fact-Checking,” Carvin and Roth want to declare unconstitutional all state laws that prohibit lying in political advertising; currently there are 15 states that make it a crime. Carvin and Roth, by the way, are part of the legal team that Jones Day has put together to represent the plaintiffs in the case before the Supreme Court that is considering the matter.  The client wants to invalidate laws prohibiting lying in political ads. 

Here’s the reason Carvin and Roth give for not wanting laws against lying in political ads: the voters and not judges should decide what is and is not a lie.  By letting the people decide, they of course mean by voting on Election Day.

There are three problems with this view:
·         The voters have no standing and are incapable of deciding if a commercial has told an out-and-out lie. They aren’t experts in gathering and weighing evidence.
·         People vote for certain candidates for a variety of reasons. A vote is not a mandate for whether an ad contained an overt lie. It is an endorsement of one candidate over another. I can imagine many scenarios in which someone might vote for someone whose campaign was caught is a lie.
·         There is no recourse, i.e., punishment when there is no law with penalties.

To Carvin and Roth every statement made in a political campaign is both true and untrue, depending upon what candidate you are supporting. But in the real world, many statements are incontrovertibly true and false. And when a candidate delivers provable falsities in an ad, that ad should be taken off the air and the campaign penalized. 

Right below the Carvin and Roth article on the printed page sits “Why Subway Doesn’t Serve a $14 Reuben Sandwich, “another hyperventilating screed from Saltsman against raising the minimum wage.  He thinks the economy will plummet if the minimum wage is raised so that it has the purchasing power that it once had. Over the past few decades, minimum wage workers have lost 40% of their purchasing power, while most goods and services had felt the effects of inflation.  The 40% rise in the minimum wage that President Obama is advocating is Saltsman’s “bête noire.” 

Near the end of the article he notes that a double cheeseburger at Shake Shack, which starts employees at more than the minimum wage, costs in excess of 40% more than a McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder. He goes on to postulate that McDonald’s would lose a ton of customers if a higher minimum wage raised its starting salaries by 40%. 

There are two problems with this conflation of the Shake Shack and the McDonald’s version of the double cheese burger:

First of all, the two food products aren’t the same thing: Shake Shack uses hormone- and antibiotic-free meat which costs much more than the fatty, chemical-infused stuff McDonald’s processes. Other Shake Shack ingredients also cost more than those at McDonald’s, plus the preparation process is more staff-intensive. Finally, not only do people pay for the higher quality ingredients at Shake Shack, they also pay for the perception of quality, which is integral to the Shake Shack brand, just as the perception of cheapness is integral to the McDonald’s brand.  So you can’t compare the Shake Shack and McDonald’s products and say the only reason that one is so much more expensive than the other is because the workers make more money.

The second fallacious part of Saltsman’s reasoning is that he assumes that if the minimum wage went up 40%, MacDonald’s costs would go up 40%. Wages are only one part of cost to operate a McDonald’s franchise, which also includes rent, utilities, raw materials, payments to the corporation and marketing. Let’s not forget, too, that the price also includes profit to the franchisee. We know that labor constitutes 20% of franchisees’ cost of operation.  Even assuming that the franchisees make no profit, figuring in all these factors means that if labor costs went up 40%, the price of the double cheese burger would have to go from $3.99 to $4.31, which is 8%, not the 40% upon which Saltsman based his argument.

Seeing these two articles on the same page made me think of Julian Benda’s important 1927 essay, The Betrayal of the Intellectuals (Le Trahison des clercs in the original French) Benda argues that European intellectuals of the preceding hundred years often ceased to follow their professional dictates to reason dispassionately about political, economic and military matters, instead becoming apologists for nationalism, warmongering and racism. In going to any lengths to support the interests of their clients, Saltsman, Carvin and Roth have abandoned the principles of good reasoning, clear thought and factually based arguments that stand as the foundation stones of their professions. They are intellectuals who have betrayed the public. They have sold out to right-wing money.
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