Saturday, September 13, 2014

Editorial: Don’t Bite Terrorist Bait


One of the favorite words Republicans use to describe President Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless,” as if his refusal to rush US military forces into foreign conflicts to satisfy foreign-policy hawks makes him a weak leader.

We’re glad President Obama has taken the time to develop a strategy and build a broad coalition of potential allies — including Iran — who will help the US pursue the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, also known as ISIL and the Islamic State) as the murderous gang that they are.

It’s depressing that a recent poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal showed only 32% approval for President Obama’s foreign policy. Some 47% of Americans believe the US is less safe than it was before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And poll respondents favored Republican over Democrats as the party best able to handle foreign policy, by a 41-23 margin.

If the polls are to be believed, terrorism works. Joan Walsh noted that the single biggest factor behind the surge of fear is the videotaped beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. “In the NBC poll, 94% said they’d heard news of the beheadings, which is higher than any other news event polled in the last five years. They accomplished what they were intended to: make Americans feel vulnerable, angry and ready to fight. Mission accomplished, ISIS!”

But ISIS couldn’t succeed in drawing the US into another land war in Iraq without “useful fools” such as former Vice President Dick Cheney who, in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill on Sept. 9, urged House Republicans to take a hard line in the fight against ISIS. The meeting was basically a GOP pep rally, and Cheney spent most of the time bashing “isolationists” and talking about how the Bush administration put the US in a position to “win” in Iraq.

In fact, there would be no opening for a militant Islamic extremist group to control large sections of Iraq and Syria and conduct ethnic cleansing of Shi’ite Muslims, Christians and other minorities if the Bush-Cheney administration had not invaded and dismantled the secular Ba’athist regime of Saddam Husseinbased on the trumped-up threat of weapons of mass destruction.

As the New York Times noted, “[Cheney] did not discuss the fact that many ISIS leaders were former Iraqi military officers who were imprisoned by American troops, nor did he dwell on the sectarian divisions and bloodletting since the 2003 American invasion.”

When President Obama was slow to arm the Syrian rebels as urged by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) last year, McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) encouraged the Saudi and Qatari governments to get the job done — and arms did move to Syrian rebel groups. “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar,” McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley in January 2014. A month later, McCain said once again, at the Munich Security Conference, “Thank God for the Saudis and Prince Bandar, and for our Qatari friends.”

But the arms apparently didn’t just go to the Free Syrian Army, the “moderate” armed opposition in the country that is backed by the US, Turkey and Western allies. Shortly after McCain’s Munich comments, Steve Clemons noted at TheAtlantic.com (June 23), Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah relieved Bandar of his Syrian covert-action portfolio, which was transferred to Saudi Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. By mid-April, just two weeks after President Obama met with King Abdullah on March 28, Bandar also was removed from his position as head of Saudi intelligence.

It turned out that two of the factions fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who received arms from Qatar and Saudi Arabia are Islamic extremist groups, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is affiliated with al Qaeda, and the ISIS which was expelled as too extreme for al Qaeda. Qatar’s military and economic largesse had made its way to Jabhat al-Nusra, Clemons was told. But ISIS was another matter. As one senior Qatari official told him, “ISIS has been a Saudi project.”

Clemons concluded, “John McCain’s desire to help rebel forces toss off a brutal dictator and fight for a more just and inclusive Syria is admirable. But as has been proven repeatedly in the Middle East, ousting strongmen doesn’t necessarily produce more favorable successor governments. Embracing figures like Bandar, who may have tried to achieve his objectives in Syria by building a monster, isn’t worth it.”

Thom Hartmann wrote, “This is history repeating itself in the worst possible way. Back in the 1980s, the CIA, the Saudis, and the Pakistanis worked together to fund the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The mujahideen were radical Islamists, but we thought it was worth it to support them because it was the Cold War and they were fighting the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

“Here in the US, the guy most responsible for getting us to support the mujahideen was a playboy Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson, who, like John McCain, thought he was just trying to help people fight for ‘democracy.’ ...

“Whatever good intentions Charlie Wilson may have had, his plan backfired and it backfired badly. Our support for the mujahideen against the Soviets — just like our support for the Khmer Rouge against the Viet Cong and our support for the Contras against the Sandinistas — had a huge blowback effect. You see, one of the people who we and the Saudis armed back in the 1980s was a rich Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who, like a lot of Muslim radicals from all over the world, saw the fight against the Soviets as a chance to prove his worth as a holy warrior.

Hartmann concluded, “Bin Laden went on to form a group known as ‘The Base’ out of the remnants of his Saudi-backed mujahideen force. You probably know ‘The Base’ by its Arabic name: Al-Qaeda. The rest, as they say, is history.”

President Obama is taking a wiser course in providing airstrikes against ISIS forces; assistance to reliable moderate allies where they can be identified, such as the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Free Syrian Army and the reconstituted Iraqi army; counterterrorism intelligence and activities to prevent ISIS attacks; and humanitarian aid.

Obama vowed to wage “a steady, relentless effort” to wipe out ISIS. “Our objective is clear: we will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy,” he said. “I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” he said. “That means I will not hesitate to take action against ISIL in Syria, as well as Iraq. This is a core principle of my presidency: if you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

He was clear that the United States would not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq, but at least 475 more military advisers will be sent in, pushing the total to about 1,700.

After the speech, John McCain blamed ISIS on Obama for withdrawing American troops from Iraq and his refusal to intervene in Syria. He said additional US special forces and advisers will be needed to direct precision air strikes, advise foreign partners on the ground and possibly conduct targeted operations against ISIS leadership.”

House Speaker John Boehner said “the president appears to view the effort against ISIL as an isolated counterterrorism campaign, rather than as what it must be: an all-out effort to destroy an enemy that has declared a holy war against America and the principles for which we stand.”

Our conclusion: Obama has plenty of feck. He has enough sense to deny ISIS the reinvasion of Iraq by American troops that the jihadis want. And he has an air force to supply cover for any native army that proves to be worth covering. And once again, thank goodness John McCain isn’t making the call. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2014
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Selections from the October 1, 2014 issue













Friday, September 12, 2014

Obama has other ways to address the ISIS threat than going to war

By Marc Jampole 

President Obama has decided that there is only one way to respond to ISIS, a pan-Islamic military organization that now controls parts of Iraq and Syria, and that’s the way the United States usually responds to foreign events that displease us: go to war.

Early reactions suggest that Congress and the American people are going to fall behind the president in lockstep, just like they did—at least at first--for both Iraqi wars, our  invasion of Grenada and the Viet Nam war.

So once again, we’re diving head first into a violent quagmire that will end up costing some U.S. lives, a lot of money and many lives of the people we claim to be helping.

The United States should have tried economic sanctions first.

The creation of a truly global economy and financial system over the past 30 years may have disappointed the economic hopes of all Americans but the very wealthiest, but it has made it much easier to fight aggressive behavior by states and other governing entities without picking up a weapon. What is happening in the Ukraine is a good example of the power of economic sanctions: Instead of continuing to grab pieces of the Ukraine, Russia has negotiated a treaty that seems to have ended the fighting and set the stage for a peaceful resolution of a situation far more complicated than what is depicted in the mainstream American media. Economic sanctions also brought Iran to the negotiating table to discuss its development of a nuclear capability, a step towards peace frowned upon only by Islam-haters among the right-wing.

The immediate response to my argument to apply economic sanctions is that ISIS is not a real state, but a terrorist organization that is trying to redraw the map in the Middle East; a map, BTW, that was gerrymandered after World War I by western powers.

But ISIS is as much a part of the new world economic order as Russia, Iran and China. We keep hearing in the mainstream news that the biggest advantage ISIS has over other terrorist organizations is that it has a lot of cash to buy weapons and maintain troops because of oil sales from the wells it controls. ISIS must be selling the oil to someone. The United States and our allies against ISIS—which should include most Middle Eastern and Western European countries—should be able to put enough pressure on whoever is buying ISIS oil to make them purchase elsewhere. We could also offer oil at cut-rate prices or other economic help to current ISIS customers. Without oil revenues, ISIS will quickly deteriorate into another gang of hoodlums.

We should also take into account that war always tends to destabilize any region. Just as overthrowing Sadam Hussein led to ISIS, the violent destruction of ISIS could lead to something much worse.

The Quaker lobbying group, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, has come up with some other actions we can take to defuse ISIS, including ceasing to ship arms to the Middle East, investing in humanitarian efforts to help the victims and developing forums for negotiation between the parties.  These all seem like sensible proposals.

I’m not saying that a combination of economic sanctions, cessation of arm sales, humanitarian relief and diplomacy will work, but we ought to at least give it a try. We know that invasion does not work and we know that bombing does not work. Why are we resorting to these tried-and-wanting solutions once again?

I urge everyone to write, phone or email their congressional representatives and U.S. senators and ask them to vote against funding military action against ISIS and for directing the president to use economic sanctions, humanitarian aid and diplomacy to address the threat of ISIS.
Art by Kevin Kreneck

Thursday, September 11, 2014

When will economists & pundits stop telling lie that education will cure inequality of income?

By Marc Jampole

Eduardo Porter of the New York Times is the latest journalist to advocate that the way to narrow the gap between what the wealthiest and everyone else earns is through education.  It’s an absurdly ridiculous argument that depends on us believing that with a college diploma nonunionized burger flippers, garbage haulers, shelf stockers and medical orderlies will be able to command higher salaries.  

In an article titled “Equation is Simple: Education = Income,” Porter uses two sets of statistics to confuse and distract us about why the top 1% have seen their incomes rise precipitously in recent decades, while the incomes at every other economic level have stagnated or deteriorated. 

First Porter quotes some computations of Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economics professor and former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor. Katz calculates that if the top 1% were taxed at the rates in effect in 1979, the government could split it up equally and give every family not in the top 1% the grand total of $7,102. Katz and Porter then contrast this $7,102 with the estimated $30,000 a year difference in wealth between what couples with two college graduates make and what families with two high school grads make. 

Porter and Katz think this contrast proves that education will address the growing inequality of income.  The reasoning sounds like something a group of died-in-the-wool right-wing first-year economics majors would cook up at 3:00 in the morning after smoking a few joints. While it’s true that education can turn the daughter of a janitor into a high-priced accountant, it couldn’t possibly qualify everyone for great-paying jobs because there aren’t that many great-paying jobs around today.

These economists who think greater education will push incomes up haven’t been looking at job trends. Most of the jobs lost in the Great Recession have been replaced by lower-paying ones. Those who predict job trends estimate that virtually all of the 20 job titles to gain the most employees over the next decade are low-paying.  It is true that many of the job titles likely to grow the most on a percentage basis are high-paying, but these job titles start with a small base: 20% of 100 engineers is a lot less than 2% of 10,000 cashiers.

If we educate everyone for higher paying jobs, what is likely to happen is that the wages for these jobs will fall, thanks to the law of supply and demand. In other words, what is proposed by Porter, Katz, Claudia Goldin, Robert Reich, economists at Standard & Poor’s and the rest of the army of scholars and pundits who have swallowed the “education ends income inequality” Kool-aid may actually end up creating more inequality.

The only way to foster greater equality of income is to implement laws and regulations that change the distribution of income. The actions are obvious, because they worked to create a more equal society roughly from 1935-1979:
  • Increase the minimum wage
  • Pass laws and regulations that make it easy for workers to unionize
  • Use tax increases on the wealthy to provide services and support to the poor and lower the cost of higher education for the poor and the middle class
  • End privatization of traditional government functions, since privatization generally leads to workers making less and management making more.
  • Pass laws that place high tariffs on imported goods and services produced in countries that do not hew to our wage, safety and environmental regulations.  

The “education ends income inequality” canard is one of many falsehoods routinely perpetrated on the American economy and public by economists and economic writers. The theory that lowering taxes on the wealthy leads to the creation of more jobs has proven to be false. The theory that illegal immigrant workers lower the incomes of other workers has been proven false. The notion that unions get in the way of one-on-one negotiations between workers and employers is an absurdity, as is the idea that people are less likely to look for work the longer their unemployment insurance runs (despite the fact that unemployment compensation is a miniscule portion of their former salary).  Privatization of prisons, the military and schools (through the charter school movement) has proven to be disasters.

That free trade between nations improves the domestic economy is not quite a lie, as shown by a study cited by Harvard’s Dani Rodrik in The Globalization Paradox, his critique of globalization.  Rodrik quantifies both the amount of wealth distributed domestically and the added gain to the U.S. economy if all tariffs were removed on all imported and exported products and services. He finds that the for every additional dollar that would be created in the United States by a totally free global trade regime there would be $50 transferred from the pockets of some groups to the bank accounts of others, primarily from workers losing their jobs to the wealthy who own the means of production, distribution and finance.  In other words, free trade is great—for the wealthy only.

In fact, the one factor that unifies all the distortions and myths believed by most mainstream economists is that acting on each of the myths leads to greater inequality of wealth.  That makes economics as practiced throughout most of the United States more of a propaganda arm of the wealthy than it is a social science. 

Friday, September 5, 2014

A cornucopia of shlock: 72 pages of gifts related to White House you can buy from 2014 White House catalog

By Marc Jampole 

Two years ago I noted that it was September 28 when the first Christmas catalog arrived in my mail box. This year the first catalog showed its pages on September 4, stretching the holiday shopping season to one third of the year.

The winner of this year’s award for first Christmas catalog to arrive is the White House Catalog, 72 pages of tchatchkes that have some connection to the White House.  The catalog comes from the White House Historical Association (WHHA), which describes itself as a nonprofit educational association “for the purpose of enhancing the understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of the Executive Mansion.”

And in America, what better way to enjoy or appreciate anything than to buy something connected to it!

How WHHA can come up with 72 pages dense with commemorative products is an exemplar of 21st century merchandising. 

Let’s quickly dispose of the first few pages of the catalog, which display White House tree ornaments. Evidently every year since at least 1981, WHHA has designed and sold a unique tree ornament, typically dedicated to one of the presidents. This year’s is a model train elaborately chiseled with details in red, white and blue, dedicated to Warren G. Harding, who evidently loved trains. The past collection of Christmas ornaments and Christmas cards featuring the presidents or the White House take the catalog to 12 pages. The ornaments are clever and well-crafted.

But what about the other 60 pages? They are jam-packed with merchandising’s greatest hits. Let’s make two lists to illustrate:

LIST OF PRODUCTS

  • Address book
  • Book mark
  • Calendar
  • Candy bowl
  • Coasters
  • Decorative boxes
  • Jewelry
  • Jigsaw puzzle
  • Letter opener
  • Mug
  • Napkins
  • Note cards
  • Pen
  • Prints
  • Scarves
  • Ties
  • Tote bag
  • Tray
  • Umbrella
WHITE HOUSE RELATED THEMES

  • Green room
  • Blue room
  • Red room
  • Medallions in Eisenhower’s china
  • Cherry blossoms
  • Scenes from White House neighborhood
  • Artists’ views of the White House
  • Eagles in White House decorations
  • American Impressionism
  • White House in 1914
  • White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony
  • For children
  • For business people

Evidently the White House Historical Association took these two lists and matched many products from column A with every theme in column B. For example, red room themed products include a letter opener, Limoges box, jigsaw puzzle, scarf and jewelry.  The cherry blossom themed items include a bookmark, note cards, puzzle, Limoges box and scarf. Scenes from White House neighborhood offers us coasters, cocktail napkins, a tote bag, placemats, jewelry and a puzzle. The Christmas tree ceremony theme brings us another two jigsaw puzzles, bookmark and prints.

Oh yes, WHHA does dedicate some pages to books and art work, mostly portraits of presidents but also scenes of the White House and other patriotic fare such as Norman Rockwell’s “Statue of Liberty.” But mostly we see a succession of themes applied to the standard mix of items people buy as gifts when they go on vacation: mugs, note cards, tote bags, scarves and puzzles.  There are even plush toy replicas of several presidential family pets.

It’s a merchandising plan that writes itself and makes the White House Historical Association Christmas catalog look no different in product mix from the catalogs of other museums, associations and nonprofit organizations.

What’s interesting is that other than the Christmas ornaments, the product category with the most items is the jigsaw puzzle. There are enough puzzles in the catalog to keep a family of four busy every evening for several years.

The ornaments are first rate, if you are into exotic Christmas ornaments, and several of the books go beyond encomiums of mealy patriotism.  But for the most part what we see here is a cornucopia of schlock, which is Yiddish for the bargain basement, the cheesy and the coarse.

But it represents something more American than apple pie or gas guzzling cars. It represents the transformation of emotion into the purchase of a product—any product. The WHHA puzzles, bookmarks, mugs and tote bags are perfect stocking stuffers or small gifts for the seventh or eighth night of Chanukah. You can give them to whomever’s name you drew out of the gift exchange hat at the office. When you visit Washington, D.C. you can do all your obligatory souvenir gift shopping at one of the association’s two shops.
These are the throwaway presents that clutter the tables and walls, but also the drawers, closets, attics, basements and garages of much of America. 

Although schlock they are, the relative worthlessness of the products is what gives them their special value, because it’s not the product that’s important, it’s the fact that a purchase was made.  It’s the fact that a relationship, emotion or holiday was celebrated by buying something and then giving it to someone.  Without the “buy” there is no emotional transaction. The advantage of cheap schlock is that it is so cheap and the reason it’s so cheap is because it is schlock. But as long as organizations make it, Americans keep buying it.

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Progressives all over the country should Reach Out for Teachout!

When I analyzed the long-shot possibilities of progressive Zephyr Teachout winning the Democratic primary for New York governor a few days back, I made a huge analytical mistake.  I forgot that the Working Families Party has already nominated Andrew Cuomo for Governor, so even if Teachout should pull off the miracle of miracles and defeat Cuomo for the Democratic nomination for governor of New York state, Cuomo will still be on the ballot come November.

There is no telling what could happen: New York is the bluest of blue states, so many voters may vote the Democratic party line, no matter who the candidate is. Cuomo’s name recognition may swing the election his way. Cuomo already has $23 million in his election kitty. The national Democratic fundraising machine may do nothing for Teachout.

Or Teachout and Cuomo may split the votes, swinging the election to conservative Republican Rob Astorino. Most progressives believe that electing Astorino as Governor would be an unmitigated disaster.

On the surface it seems as if New York progressives better vote for Cuomo or risk Astorino.

But consider the facts: Both Cuomo and Astorino are for fracking. Both are for lower taxes for businesses and against higher taxes for the wealthy. Both support union-busting charter schools.  Hasn’t Cuomo just spent four years playing ball with Republican state legislators?  It is true that Cuomo is much better on social issues than Astorino, but it’s New York we’re talking about. No one is messing with a woman’s right to an abortion and no one is taking away the hard earned right of gays to marry. Evolution and climate change will be taught in the public schools.

Consider, too, that Cuomo has refused to debate Teachout and has said that debates can be a disservice to democracy. This kind of fascist double-talk in and of itself should disqualify Cuomo from our consideration.

In her career and political life, Zephyr Teachout has never swayed from standard progressive positions on the environment, the economy, social issues and education. She is a true progressive who deserves the votes of those opposed to fracking and charter schools, and in favor of more support of education and alternative energy and government policies that promote job growth and an equitable distribution of wealth.

Progressives in New York have an historic opportunity to send a real message not just to New York state but to the country that we want policies that lead to economic equality, higher wages, more jobs, smaller classrooms, lower tuition, more unionized workers, alternative energy development, more mass transit and a cleaner environment.  It’s easy for the ruling elite to ignore and invalidate a series of demonstrations like the Occupy movement. But they can’t turn their backs on the voters—that is, if we vote.

Because of the national implications of the New York state primary race for governor, I’m proposing a national campaign by progressives to “Reach Out for Teachout.” 

To be part of Reach Out for Teachout, all you have to do is identify every New York state resident among your friends and family and contact all of them about Teachout by email, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. Ask all of the New York residents in your vast (or not so vast) network to vote for Teachout on September 9 in the Democratic primary election.  And tell them to tell all of their friends to vote for Teachout.

Starting with OpEdge readers, maybe Reach Out for Teachout will go viral. We have seen the power of social media to aid in revolutions in other countries.  Maybe it can help start a revolution by vote in the United States. First beat Cuomo, then beat Astorino. Put the Democratic Party and our elected officials across the country on notice that we expect policies that help others than just the top one percent of the wealth ladder.

I urge you to work your lists and get out the New York vote for Teachout, even if you live in Duluth or New Orleans.


Reach Out for Teachout.

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

The lesson from LA’s decaying infrastructure is that tax rates are too low

The front page of today’s New York Times tells the sad story of Los Angeles’ crumbling infrastructure.  Roadways, sidewalks and water pipes are in a state of decay thanks to several decades of tight municipal budgets. Close to 40% of LA’s roads are graded D or F. The average age of a city water pipe is 58 years. More than 4,000 miles of sidewalk—37% of all pedestrian walkways in the city—are in severe disrepair. A nonprofit transportation research group says that the average LA driver spends $842 a year just on car repairs resulting from the bad roads. How much more does fixing the water damage from broken pipes cost residents each year? 

In total, city officials estimate that it will take $8.1 billion to fix the worst roads, repair the sidewalks and replace aging water pipes.  Much of the Times article bemoans this expense in light of the total LA city budget of just $26 billion. 

But $8.1 billion should be chump change for LA, a city with a population of about 3.85 million.

Let’s do the math, something that the Times and the city officials and experts quoted in the article fail to do. $8.1 billion breaks down to $2,085.30 per person living in the City of Los Angeles.  If bringing the LA infrastructure up to snuff were financed over 10 years, it would cost less than $210 per person per year, or $420 per year if only households in the top half of the annual income spectrum were obligated to pay for these necessary infrastructure improvements. In the scenario in which the top half of income-earners were assessed the entire bill to fix what’s broke with LA roads, sidewalks and water pipes, the poorest taxpayers paying the assessment would see an additional 7/10ths of a percent in income taxed. But on average, these people would save a minimum of $422 overall, since auto repair costs would plummet.

Now one could make a very strong argument that the roads, water pipes and sidewalks of the City of Los Angeles serve all residents of the county. If we therefore spread the costs over all 10 million residents of Los Angeles County, it would compute to $810 per resident, or $81 per year for 10 years, or $161 per year if only the top half of income earners paid.

If presented with the option of spending $81 of $161 more per year for 10 years and getting safer and faster highways, more efficient water systems and more walkable pedestrian ways (probably not of too much interest to Angelinos, who seem to prefer riding in cars), most county residents would vote “yes.”

But of course, we’re never presented with the costs broken down in such a common sense way. We get the big number and a lot of hand-wringing from politicians.  And in all too many cases such as the Times article, we’re reminded how much of the municipal budget is dedicated to paying the pensions of former city workers. The implication of course is that if we walked away from our commitment to pay pensions—as many on the right would like us to do—we’d have the money to pay for maintaining highway and water pipes.

In Los Angeles, and throughout the country, we are seeing the disastrous end-game of the lower tax philosophy that began strangling the nation some 35 years ago. The big idea behind the brand of conservatism called Reaganism has always been to starve government. Now we know what anorexic government looks like: Pot holes everywhere. Frequent flooding from broken water pipes. More slip and fall accidents. Larger school classes. A gutting of extracurricular activities and enrichment courses such as art and music in public schools. Public colleges that are unaffordable to many of a state’s citizens. Inadequate mass transit.

And what did lower taxes get people? Not much unless you’re wealthy or upper middle class, since those are the people who have received the lion’s share of the income transferred to private individuals through reducing federal, state and local tax rates so many times since 1980.

Also think of these numbers: Trillions of dollars spent to destabilize Iraq through invasion (not to mention thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives). $34 billion in grant funding from the Department of Homeland Security to militarize local police department with sophisticated vehicles and weaponry meant for wars, not domestic policing.  

Anyone interested in the future of our country should judge all elected officials on their willingness or lack of willingness to raise taxes. Don’t vote for anyone who wants to lower taxes. Actively support anyone who explicitly states they want to raise taxes on the wealthy, near wealthy or businesses. It doesn’t matter that much what the candidate wants to do with the money—we have pressing needs in education, infrastructure development, mass transit, development of alternative energy sources and cleaning the environment. It doesn’t matter, as long as the candidate doesn’t want to use additional tax revenues to pay for more guns or tax breaks to businesses. 

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Editorial: Throw Out Oligarchs

Researchers recently calculated how America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where wealthy elites wield most of the power. Using data from over 1,800 different policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, the researchers found that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene get their way in political decisions, regardless of the will of the majority of voters.

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy,” Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page wrote, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Gilens, of Princeton University, and Page, of Northwestern University, compared the political preferences of Americans at the 50th income percentile to preferences of Americans at the 90th percentile, as well as major lobbying or business groups, Brendan James noted at TalkingPointsMemo.com. They found that the government — whether Republican or Democratic — more often follows the preferences of the higher-income group rather than the middle-income group.

This conclusion does not rate as a surprise to close observers of the political scene, either in Washington, D.C., or in the various state capitals. Nor is it a new development caused by recent Supreme Court decisions allowing more money in politics, such as Citizens United, the 2010 decision that allowed corporations and independent PACs to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections, or the April 2 ruling on McCutcheon v. FEC that struck down limits on the total amount that an individual may donate in an election cycle. As data stretching back to the 1980s suggests, this has been a long-term trend, and is therefore harder for most people to perceive, let alone reverse.

“Ordinary citizens might often be observed to ‘win’ (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail,” they write.

We don’t believe we have lost democracy irretrievably. We let the monied elites take it over but voters can take it back. Ideology that was relegated to right-wing groups such as the John Birch Society in the 1960s and ‘70s was promoted to the mainstream by wealthy backers of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and conservative media that made the supply-side “voodoo” economics fantasy respectable. Voodoo economics is still “mainstream” Republican economic policy, even though the combination of tax cuts and deregulation of bankers and markets was tried and failed spectacularly during the George W. Bush Administration.

As the professors demonstrated, we didn’t lose democracy in a couple election cycles. We lost it over the course of a generation and we’ll need to take it back over a series of election cycles. Election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2008 wasn’t enough to turn the tide against the plutocrats as long as there were enough Big Business Democrats willing to side with Republicans to block progressive initiatives in the Senate. Progressive Dems had to swallow compromises on the 2009 stimulus bill, but the Democrats still managed to pump billions of dollars into the economy and helped turn around the Bush recession. They also were forced to compromise on health care and financial services reforms — but Democrats still managed to force some accountability on the banksters and insurance executives and they made insurance available to everybody except for the working poor in obstructionist red states.

Unfortunately, many progressives took the wrong lesson from their disappointment with the Democrats, as they sat out the 2010 election. Republicans not only took over the US House of Representatives; they also gained control over many statehouses and gerrymandered congressional districts to solidify their ill-gotten gains for a decade. In the meantime, they are passing voter suppression bills to make it harder for the working poor to vote, and the GOP majority on the Supreme Court, which already has neutered the Voting Rights Act, is not inclined to stop them.

Now Republicans threaten to take over the Senate and shut down President Obama’s regulatory authority and his ability to correct the conservative imbalance on the courts. In recently leaked remarks from a Koch Brothers-sponsored event, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell laid out his plan for shrinking the federal government if he gets to be majority leader next year: Republicans would place riders in spending bills that would limit executive authority on healthcare, financial services, the Environmental Protection Agency and other regulatory agencies. He also said the Senate would not be wasting its time debating issues such as the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, or helping middle-class students manage their college debts. “We’re not going to be debating all these gosh-darn proposals,” he said — and the Kochs have put up $290 million to make sure McConnell gets to shut down those debates. That’s why bills that have overwhelming support — such as raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits and giving students a break on their student loans — won’t see the light of day in McConnell’s Senate.

President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may not be our idea of progressive champions when they have to plead with conservative Dems and non-rabid Republicans to pass a bill through the Senate, but if you gave Obama and Reid 68 Democrats in the Senate, like Lyndon Johnson had from 1965-67, and put Nancy Pelosi back in charge in the House, then you might see some serious legislating like Johnson accomplished with the Medicare, Medicaid and other Great Society initiatives as well as passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

That sort of electoral rebuke to the ruling elite almost certainly isn’t going to happen this year. Even the most optimistic Democrats aren’t predicting a 13-seat pickup for Democrats in the Senate, much less a sweep in the House. But handing the Senate to Mitch McConnell won’t help the people restore democracy any time in the foreseeable future.

Justice Starts with Honest Numbers

Events in Ferguson, Mo., should open a national conversation — not a shouting match — about the relationship of police and the communities they are supposed to protect and serve. One thing the federal government should do is provide accurate and uniform statistics of how many people are killed by police every year, and under what circumstances.

Congress in 2000 passed the bipartisan Death in Custody Reporting Act, which required states to report to the Department of Justice the death of any person who is detained, arrested, en route to incarceration, or incarcerated in state or local facilities or a boot camp prison. Unfortunately, the law expired in 2006 and while the Bureau of Justice Statistics continues to collect information, reporting is spotty.

In 2006, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported 721 arrest-related deaths, including 447 killed by police, two killed by other persons, 67 suicides, 76 intoxication deaths, 47 accidental injury, 34 natural causes and 56 unknown causes.

Jim Fisher of JimFisherTrueCrime.blogspot.com used the Internet to track police-involved shootings in 2011 and found that police shot 1,146 people and killed 607 that year.

(The FBI tallied 404 “justifiable” homicides, where police say they killed a felon, in 2011. That number does not necessarily include those who were unarmed and/or minding their own business when confronted by police. For 2012, the FBI said local police reported at least 410 “justifiable” killings.)

Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) has been working to get the Death in Custody Reporting Act renewed. He got the House to pass the bill in 2009, 2011 and again in December 2013. That bill is sitting in the Senate and the NAACP has urged its members to contact their senators and push them to pass HR 1447 before the Senate adjourns.

Let’s at least get a roll call to see who is against honest numbers.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2014




Populist.com
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Copyright © 2014 The Progressive Populist
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Selections from the September 15, 2014 issue





DISPATCHES
Republicans stop talking about O’care in campaign ads;
Medicaid resistance hurts hospitals;
GOP beats teabaggers—but can they win the Senate?;
Party of Lincoln takes aim at black voters;
McConnell makes big promises to big donors if GOP takes Senate;
Top GOP Senate candidates praise Koch network;
Burger King flees US taxes;
Free Press seeks to block Comcast takeover of Time Warner;
Medical marijuana answers prescription painkiller epidemic;
Texas courts says it's OK for bosses to lie to workers;
Christie loses billions to Wall Street fleecers;
Still waiting for Voting Rights reinstatement ...

E. GRECO and W. COLLINS
Solar power gets hot, hot, hot

ROGER BYBEE
Scott Walker’s offshoring flip-flop

WENONAH HAUTER
Bureau of Land Management’s frackopoly

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Rich-poor newborn gap slowly closing







Monday, August 25, 2014

To New York progressives: Vote for Teachout in primary!

By Marc Jampole 

New York State could serve as a model of how progressives can move the right-of-Eisenhower Democratic Party back towards the left. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s version of Barack Obama, is running for reelection as governor of the Empire State. But first there’s the little matter of the September 9 primary in which Cuomo faces Zephyr Teachout, a very progressive professor of law at Fordham University.

Cuomo has essentially run the state of New York by looking rightward.  He put a cap on property taxes and wants to lower taxes for businesses. He blocked New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund pre-schools, preferring to take money from the existing state budget, which means other programs will do without. Cuomo is an ardent supporter of charter schools, a conservative initiative originated to bust teachers’ unions and has proven to underperform and undercut funding for public schools.  And like President Obama, Cuomo is too fast to make deals with Republicans that continue the disastrous economic policies of the past 30+ years.

Let’s not forget about the whiff of corruption now emanating from the Cuomo body politic. Cuomo empanelled a state commission to investigate corruption in government and then dismantled it when it started turning over the rocks of his administration. In the best case scenario, Cuomo is exercising too much power in an effort to subvert democracy. The worst case would involve a cover-up of the kind of unethical and often illegal crony capitalism that seems to plague Republican governors these days.

Cuomo does support gay marriage and tends to speak and vote progressive on most social issues, but so do virtually every Democrat and a growing number of Republicans nowadays. He did pass one of the toughest gun control laws in the country after the Newtown mass murders, for which he should be applauded.

Teachout has no chance of beating Cuomo in the primary, but every vote she gets should turn Cuomo’s head a little bit to the left. If Teachout could get more than 45% of the vote, it would send a strong message to Cuomo to shift leftward on economic issues.

Which is exactly what Cuomo doesn’t want to hear and doesn’t want to do. That’s why the Governor sued to keep Teachout off the ballot and then appealed when he lost. Even though he knows the odds are overwhelmingly in his favor, he does not want to have to listen to progressives. It would upset the corporate bankers who back him and who might up the ante if he decides to run for president of the United States.

The worst that can happen by voting for Teachout is that she wins, which will be very good for New York State and the nation. The Republican Rob Astorino, a former Catholic radio personality, is far too right-wing for New York State. While it’s probable that conservatives would pour tens of millions of dollars into a campaign against the relatively unknown Teachout, the Democrats also have a ton of money for whoever the candidate for governor of New York happens to be.  I’m confident any Democrat will beat Rob Astorino in New York State, especially if turnout is high. And it stands to reason that more Democrats would come out to vote for a face fresh than they would for the incumbent expected to steamroll Astorino.  In other words, if Teachout won the primary, she would also win the election.

What we have then is a win-win situation for progressives. By voting for Teachout in the Democratic primary, New York voters can send a message to Andrew Cuomo—and every Democrat considering a run for the presidency.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

America can learn a lot from the Ferguson situation, that is, if we’re willing to

By Marc Jampole 

The American public is relearning many lessons from the events in Ferguson following the shooting of an unarmed teenager by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.  The three biggest takeaways from this tragedy and its aftermath are:
  1. We have gone way too far in militarizing our local police forces.
  2. There is still rampant institutional racism built into our policing and criminal justice system.
  3. The police and criminal justice system does itself and the people it is supposed to protect a disservice by never admitting a mistake.
The ramifications of these big picture dynamics affect more than the relationship between authorities and the citizens they protect. Going too far in militarizing our police, for example, results partially from the political cowardice and cronyism that led Congress to give every state a cut of the money we dedicated to fighting terrorism in the USA Patriot Act instead of focusing the money on those areas and systems most vulnerable to terrorist attack, i.e., New York, Washington, D.C. and our docks and harbors. Of course, the opportunity for American manufacturers to sell to local police forces with money supplied by the feds was too good for the crony capitalists who run our country to pass up. The result—local police everywhere now own all kinds of military equipment that they don’t need and, which, when used, only make a sensitive street situation more volatile. The number of SWAT team attacks has skyrocketed across the country, as have the number of SWAT invasions directed at the wrong address.  I’m thinking that the money spent on military-grade guns and vehicles might have been better spent in the recruitment and training of minority police officers and the introduction of less violent ways to confront suspects.

Ferguson is only the latest proof that minorities and the poor get treated badly by the criminal justice system across the country.  As Jeff Smith, a former Missouri state senator and professor of sociology at The New School, pointed out in a New York Times opinion piece, Ferguson does the same kind of racial profiling that the courts have made New York City stop doing.  In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of police stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of African-Americans, numbers which are way out line with the percentage of the total Ferguson population that they represent, which is about 62%. Even more damning is the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on African-Americans, 22 percent of whom were carrying something illegal, compared to 34 percent of whites.   

It’s almost painful to see the Ferguson police chief try to justify the actions of his department. For example, instead of thanking the Governor for bringing in the Highway Patrol and National Guard and installing a charismatic African-American to be the face of the police response, Chief Tom Jackson prefers to complain about the insult to the Ferguson police that the switch in authorities and tactics represented.
Instead of admitting he was wrong to bring out the tanks, the Ferguson police chief released information meant to stain the reputation of the young man who was shot six times, including twice in the head. First it was news that the boy was a suspect in a robbery, which the officer who fired the shots was decent enough to admit he didn’t know when the confrontation occurred. Now we’ve learned that the boy—Michael Brown—had marijuana in his system. So what? It wouldn’t matter if he was a suspect in 30 armed robberies and they found traces of cocaine, heroin, Oxycontin and meth in his body. An experienced police office trained in protecting the public and probably in martial arts fired six bullets into his body. One or maybe two bullets and I—and the rest of the public—could understand the act as possibly, maybe necessary. But six??  The officer should get his due process, but the police department would advance the cause of better understanding between police and minorities by admitting its mistakes and stating that it will not support officers who behave brutally or illegally.

But closing ranks isn’t new for the criminal justice system. Several times a year we read of district attorneys who are opposed to new trials or the release of the unjustly imprisoned, or those who will fight tooth and nail to insist that a retarded or near retarded death row prisoner has a high enough IQ to qualify for the death penalty. We recently saw the union representing New York City police department cry that is was unfair to investigate the death of an innocent man from a police choke hold. The union also bemoaned the lack of solidarity of the teachers’ union to participate in a march against police brutality.  The union made itself look bad by not explicitly stating that it did not support the use of chokeholds, which is an illegal tactic for police in New York State.

People and organizations make mistakes. Organizations occasionally hire individuals who won’t follow the rules or make their own rules. When you admit your mistake and then fix it, you gain the respect of others. When you hunker down and defend your position even after it painfully clear you were wrong, others begin to disrespect you and question your authority. Now imagine decades of closing ranks and protecting bad decisions and rogue employees and you begin to understand why minority communities distrust our criminal justice system.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Editorial: Still Cleaning Up After W


President Obama has sensibly resisted attempts to draw him into the civil war in Syria and to militarize confrontations with Iran and Russia, but former Vice President Dick Cheney, who personifies everything that’s wrong with American foreign policy, recently surfaced to accuse the President of projecting “weakness” abroad and “crippling” the US military.

In an Aug. 10 interview with radio host John Catsimatidis, Cheney said he traces “most” of the problems of Washington to the current administration. He cleared his nominal former boss, George W. Bush, of responsibility for the actions a decade ago that led to the series of bad choices Obama now faces. “They can’t blame George Bush any more,” Cheney said. Of Obama, he said, “I think he’s been a failure as a president. I think the scandals, with respect to the Veterans Administration, with respect to the IRS, these are bad situations.” But “even worse,” he said, are cuts in the military budget.

This is the sort of claptrap you get when you don’t prosecute war criminals, but it reflects the Republican party line.

First of all, the VA “scandal” was that Congresses under the Bush and Obama administrations didn’t appropriate enough money to take care of the wounded warriors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. And the IRS “scandal” was that the tax agency had required politics-oriented groups on the left and the right to comply with the law, which limits political activity of organizations seeking non-profit and tax-exempt status.

As for the military cutbacks, that’s what you should get when you wind down two wars. And the cuts have been modest: defense and international security assistance still amounted to $643 billion, or 19% of the federal budget, for fiscal year 2013. The US still spends more than the next eight countries combined, according to 2013 figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (Runner-up China spends $188 billion on its military, Russia $87.8 billion and Saudi Arabia $67 billion, though the Saudi total also includes police.)

Anyway, Obama withdrew troops from Iraq in 2011 under the terms drawn up under Bush’s administration. The Bush hawks, who ran the Mideast into the ditch but all found employment in private industry and/or “think tanks” and have never been far from the TV chat show cameras, yelled bloody murder that Obama had let us down.

The mess in the Mideast shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody, as it was predicted a decade ago. In a Jan. 16, 2003, column, Molly Ivins wrote, “I assume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side (God forgive me if that is hubris). The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20% Kurd, 20% Sunni and 60% Shi’ite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’”

But Bill Kristol, right-wing ideologue and chairman of the Project for a New American Century, which promoted the string of regime changes in the Mideast that started with the fall of Saddam Hussein, in 2003 dismissed concerns that sectarian differences would be a serious problem. “On this issue of the Shia in Iraq, I think there’s been a certain amount of, frankly, a kind of pop sociology in America that, you know, somehow the Shia can’t get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There’s almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq’s always been very secular.”

In our March 1, 2003, editorial, “Inspect, Don’t Invade,” while UN inspectors were still in Iraq, we wrote, “We wish we could believe that invading Iraq would solve the problems. More likely the bombing of Baghdad and other parts of Iraq to clear the way for the invasion will kill tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi people, create hundreds of thousands of refugees, plunge the Middle East into chaos and expand the radical Islamic jihad against the western world.”

But Bush and Cheney bulled ahead anyway. US troops routed the Iraqi military and secured its oilfields but let the rest of the country go to hell. On March 31, 2003, Egypt’s then-President Hosni Mubarak said the US-led war on Iraq would produce “one hundred new bin Ladens,” driving more Muslims to anti-Western militancy. “When it is over, if it is over, this war will have horrible consequences,” Mubarak told Egyptian soldiers in the city of Suez, while hundreds of Arab volunteers were streaming to Iraq pledging to join in “martyrdom operations” against US and British forces

Lou Dubose noted in the Aug. 1 Washington Spectator that Peter Galbraith—a former US ambassador to Croatia and adviser to the government of Iraqi Kurdistan—in Jan. 11, 2007, testimony at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a foreign-policy catastrophe and the tragic and unjustifiable destruction of a country; the toxic politics of Nouri al-Maliki’s government; and the sectarian fault lines that effectively divided Iraq into three countries.

“The alternative to partition,” he said, “is a continued US-led effort at nation-building that has not worked for the last four years and, in my view, has no prospect for success. That, Mr. Chairman, is a formula for war without an end.”

Now forced nation-building of Iraq at US gunpoint is the option that Republicans are blasting Obama for not pursuing.

Even Hillary Clinton criticized President Obama’s foreign policy in an interview published Aug. 10 in The Atlantic. She said the failure to help build up a credible fighting force among the protesters against Assad in Syria “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” She added, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

“Don’t do stupid stuff” might not be an organizing principle, but it is a pretty good prime directive. And Obama has been smart, at least compared with what the Bushites did from 2001 to 2009 and what John McCain proposed to do. We have our criticisms of specific Obama policies, but if McCain (or Mitt Romney) had become president we might well be at war with Iran and/or Russia, arming Syrian rebel groups that turned out to have terrorist ties.

Hillary Needs a Challenger


One of our concerns with Hillary Clinton is the perception that she intends to pursue a centrist neoliberal course as the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

Progressives who want to move Clinton to the left had better come up with a candidate who can give Hillary a run for her money and perhaps nudge her to adopt a more populist tone.

Some progressives hold out hope that Sen. Elizabeth Warren will challenge Clinton, but we take her at her word that she has no plans to run for president. However, Sen. Bernie Sanders is considering a challenge for the Democratic nomination.

Sanders has said he respects the former Secretary of State, but cautioned against assuming that she will be the Democratic nominee before she’s even announced her candidacy.

In an interview with ABC’s Jeff Zeleny, Sanders said, “She has accomplished a lot of positive things in her career, but I’m not quite sure that the political process is one in which we anoint people ...

“What is her agenda? I don’t know, you don’t know. She hasn’t said,” Sanders noted.

Sanders said he does not “wake up every morning with a burning desire to be president of the United States,” but he reiterated his commitment to fight for political and economic equality as the US shifts toward “an oligarchic form of society in which a handful of billionaire families control not only the economy of this country ... I will do everything I can to prevent that from happening.”

If progressives want Sanders, or any other candidate, to run for president from the left, they need to show they can make it a credible race. “Look, it’s easy for me to give a good speech, and I give good speeches,” Sanders told Zeleny. “It is harder to put together a grassroots organization of hundreds of thousands of millions of people prepared to work hard and take on the enormous amounts of money that will be thrown against us.”

To encourage Sanders to run, contact Progressive Democrats of America at pdamerica.org or call 877-239-2093. — JMC

Note: this was edited Aug. 26 with corrected Russian military expenditures.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2014
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Friday, August 15, 2014

The world gets a tutorial on how to create wall-to-wall media coverage of the death of a celebrity

By Marc Jampole

The recent deaths of two well-known actors, Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall, dominated the news media this week, but in very predictable ways. The news media has got celebrating the life of a famous person down to a science. If the feeding frenzy on the dead bones of a troubled comic or a classy New York personality has been so thorough, it’s only because the media has done it many, many times before.

No reporter assigned to write a story about a celebrity death should have to scratch his or her head in frustration or confusion, wondering where to begin. There are so many models from which to select that most of the stories about dead celebrities seem to write themselves. Besides the basic obituary of the star, the media churns out story after story on the following topics:
  1. Analysis and appreciations of the celebrity’s body of work
  2. Reaction of the public
  3. Reaction of the star’s family
  4. Reaction of other celebrities
  5. Anecdotes and memories, primarily by other celebrities
  6. The funeral
  7. In-depth coverage of the reason the star died—e.g., suicide in middle age for Robin Williams
  8. The last moments or days in the star’s life
  9. The star’s significance in his or her field and to the larger society
  10. The lessons we can all learn from the star’s life or death
  11. Past scandals or high moments in the life/career of the star, e.g. Bacall & Bogie supporting the blacklisted actors, directors and technicians
  12. Unfinished work that the public may be able to see after the star’s death
  13. The star’s financial state
  14. The star’s will and who gets what
  15. The dispensation of the star’s real estate
  16. Any special tributes that cities or organizations are making, from moments of silence to all-star concerts for charity
  17. His or her past sex life
Eventually, the backlash starts. We’ve already started seeing it with Robin Williams. Suddenly there are stories questioning how the news media covered the death;  whether the celebrities who commented were self-serving or in good/bad taste; and  whether the celebrity’s significance really warranted all the coverage. The media like nothing better than to flagellate themselves—or should I say, other media. 

Input Robin Williams into Google News and you will find several versions of all of these generic story ideas; a search for Lauren Bacall and you’ll find at least one example of most of these concepts.

These media frenzies can go on for days, or in the case of someone of the stature of Michael Jackson, who died under suspicious circumstances, for weeks or months.

Some justify this intensive coverage of the death of a celebrity as part of the national mourning: the news media channels what everyone is feeling into a barrage of stories that give us all a good catharsis.

But the therapeutic value of mass media’s mass mourning begs a question: who is being glorified and beautified and why?  Why does the media go on for days about Robin Williams or Phillip Seymour Hoffman and give cursory attention to the deaths of Maya Anjelou or Gabriel Garcia Marquez?  What about scientists like Jancinto Convit or Andres Carrasco. Or Bill Dana, who flew the X-15 and other experimental aircraft or NASA engineer John Houbolt? Or how about Howard Baker, once the voice of conscience of the Republican Party? Why don’t we find out about their children, finances, real estate, deep secrets, life history, fears and significance?

If Robin William’s touched the lives of more people, it is not just because he starred in a few TV shows and movies. It’s also because the news media focuses much more on actors, singers, athletes and celebrities (people who are famous for being famous or for being rich) than they do on scientists, engineers, classical composers, elected officials (except presidents), scholars, jazz musicians and other high achievers.

The more significant question, though, is not who is being glorified, it’s why there is so much of it. I would be just as disappointed to see newspapers and the Internet stuffed with meaningless stories about a recently deceased great historian or scientist. In either case, the coverage is excessive because it drives out coverage of other, more important news. We get woefully inadequate coverage of local political campaigns and issues, much less than the news media gave us twenty or even ten years ago. Neither the New York Times nor Wall Street Journal seem to have enough space to do any stories on Democratic candidates this year, although I suspect a bias in favor the Republicans is part of the reason for ignoring Democratic primary races. We are painfully unaware of what is happening in many parts of the world.  The mass media has practically ignored studies that show that charter schools are ineffective, immigrants raise the wages of other workers, we could supply the entire world’s electricity needs with windmills right now, inequality of wealth is growing and raising taxes on the wealthy leads to economic growth.

In short, the coverage of important economic, social and political issues is sparse, and often one-sided. Instead of news, we get dead celebrity worship.  

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Have people in America & Great Britain gotten meaner, & if so, why?

By Marc Jampole

People have gotten meaner because they have no vested interest in worrying about their fellow human beings. That’s the conclusion of Tom Clark (with Anthony Heath) in Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump¸ a recent book that sifts through a slew of recent research and impressionistic interviews related to the effect of the Great Recession on the economy and the fabric of society in the United States and Great Britain.

Clark makes his argument through a series of assertions, each of which he proves with research and illustrates with a handful of conversations with people who suffered during the recession that ended a few years ago if you belonged to the upper 1% in income/wealth, but continues for everyone else:
1.      This last “great recession” essentially affected a small part of the population, although everyone outside the 1% has suffered from stagnant wages over the past 30 years.
2.      Those who suffered from the recession the most have tended not to recover.
3.      Unlike other recessions, it was easy to predict who would and would not be affected and not recover from the Great Recession: the poor, the underemployed, the undereducated, primarily minorities and the young.
4.      Compared to previous recessions since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, Anglo-Saxon governments did much less for those who suffered the worst effects of the Great Recession.
5.      The attitudes of the wealthy, middle class and working poor towards victims of the Great Recession were much less generous to victims of previous recessions. A blame-it-on-the-victim mentality replaced the former generosity displayed in surveys in former recessions about whether people liked government support of victims of economic dislocation.

Clark establishes these facts and then uses them to develop a grand synthesis which he thinks explains what he sees as a hard turn right in both the United States and Great Britain over the past 10 years: In former recessions, the impact was widespread and serendipitous, so people supported government intervention and support of victims out of self-interest: maybe they would need the help. But we could predict who the long-term and permanent victims of the Great Recession would be. The result: even though—or perhaps because—most everyone else has been struggling, they did not think they would need the government benefits and so did not support expansion of benefits. Additionally, more of the middle class and working poor grew to believe that large portions of those receiving benefits were “undeserving.” In a sense, 30 years of static wages and a slow erosion of buying power made everyone hunker down and get more selfish.

Clark’s argument resonates to a careful student of the history of healthcare reform. In Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Struggle over Health Care Reform, Paul Starr points out that because most Americans already had health insurance through their employers, Medicare or Medicaid, they had no vested interest in seeing the healthcare law now called Obamacare pass, and in fact recognized that it would mean that they would pay more without getting more to help fund those getting coverage under the proposed new law. Republican Scott Brown, U.S. Senator from Massachusetts for what baseball people used to call “a cup of coffee,” expressed this attitude best when he said he liked the recently enacted healthcare law in Massachusetts but did not want the citizens he represented to pay for extending the Massachusetts model to the rest of the country, which Obamacare essentially did.

But although Clark makes a compelling case, I think he discounts the impact of the constant barrage of propaganda we have endured since the rise of Reaganism. We’ve had more than 30 years of the right using code words to demonize the poor and downtrodden, such as “welfare queens, “those people,” “the 47% who think they’re victims” and “urban culture problems.” We’ve had more than 30 years of the glorification of the free market and the nonsense that government always produces inferior solutions. For more than 30 years, we’ve been told that the ultra-rich worked hard for their money and deserve what they get, whereas those who fail have only themselves to blame. More than 30 years of media bashing of unions, teachers and public school workers. More than 30 years of hearing and reading the lie that giving food stamps, medical care and other aid to the poor makes them dependent on handouts and saps their self-reliance so that they prefer to sit on their duffs and do nothing all day. We’ve been told the lie that the only thing that hurts the economy more than giving money to poor people, who will spend it all and thereby create jobs, is to cut taxes on the wealthy. The news media has drummed into our minds that we have to pay down the debt, even if it means gutting social welfare benefits.

In short, some 30 years of brain-washing has made Americans—and evidently Brits, too—inured to the suffering of their fellow neighbors and has atomized our communities into millions of selfish individuals.

I am reluctant to recommend Hard Times as a read, because it’s written in an irritating combination of styles, taking the worst from both a jargon-laden academic style and the slang-and-case-history approach of pop sociology. What’s worse, it’s not even U.S. slang, but that of the foreign tongue known as British. The ideas are certainly worth assimilating and the book is relatively short, but still, if you’re a stickler for good writing, its style will infuriate even as its ideas captivate. 

Monday, August 11, 2014

Neither Israel nor United States can justify current bombing campaigns, but Hamas & ISIS are also wrong

By Marc Jampole

Someone on Facebook recently wondered why it’s okay for the United States to bomb the ISIS positions in Iraq but not okay for Israel to bomb the Gaza strip. By “okay,” I’m pretty sure she was asking why the mainstream news media and our political leaders applauded one and not the other. She was correct to observe that while there has been almost universal approval of Obama bombing Iraq (except for those who think he should be doing more!), the press and politicos have expressed mixed feelings about Israel’s actions.

In my mind, both the United States and Israel are pursuing the worst possible courses from both a moral and a political standpoint. Neither country will achieve the stated goals on its acts of violence.

The Iraq situation is much easier to analyze, for the simple reason that no U.S. lives are in harm’s way and no one has attacked our country.

We hear two main reasons to bomb: 1) ISIS is becoming a destabilizing force in the region after having carved out major territory for itself in both Syria and Iraq; 2) We owe it to Iraq, which is a kind of “we broke it so we have to fix it” argument.

This second argument often comes from Republicans and their supporters as part of their program of blaming the President for the situation since he authorized final withdrawal of American troops from Iraq a few years ago. It’s as short-sighted and self-serving as the argument that Obama caused the Great Recession.  Iraq has always been a glued-together country. Even in ancient times, the territory that was Iraq consisted of two and sometimes three national entities. Just as Yugoslavia fell apart as soon as strongman Tito died, so did Iraq splinter when the United States destroyed the strongman government of Sadam Hussein. The violent fractionalization of Iraq was predictable, and many people predicted it.  It has also been painfully obvious to anyone willing to look the facts straight in the face that the country would remain a seething pit of terrorism as long as United States troops remained in the country and that it would soon break apart soon after we left. That’s exactly what has happened.

All the U.S. bombing can do now is shore up a corrupt and weak regime that does not represent all its citizens.  It does not offer a permanent solution.  Instead, U.S. bombing slows down the inevitable process of the various factions in Iraq coming to terms with one another, either in a unified country or in a number of smaller countries. It’s not likely to be pretty and will probably be violent, but with the United States bombing, it is definitely going to be violent and will take a lot longer to achieve. It’s time for us to leave bad enough alone by not bombing or committing any military action in Iraq, while increasing our non-military support for a newly elected government of Iraq that would be willing not to play ethnic or religious favorites.  I’m not saying that ISIS is not a grave threat; what I’m saying is the U.S. position is too compromised from past actions in Iraq to help in the fight against ISIS. We should stay on the sidelines of the military battle, and instead increase humanitarian aid, call for and uphold an arms embargo in Iraq and Syria and coordinate with the United Nations on evacuation and diplomatic efforts.

Like the United States in Iraq, to a large degree Israel made its own untenable situation through years of harsh treatment of the Palestinians, brutal execution of wars and unwillingness to be flexible at the negotiating table. To be sure, Israel has not been alone in its unwillingness to confront the other side peaceably. Moreover, Hamas and its predecessors have conducted terrorist campaigns against Israeli citizens.

But Israel’s past harsh ways have never worked, unless the country’s real goals are to keep a population that it believes to be inherently inferior in a political and social structure akin to apartheid, no matter how much violence it takes. I do not believe this patently anti-Semitic characterization of Israel’s actions, which is why I can’t understand why Israel’s political and military leaders keep answering violence with an escalation of brutality. The numbers speak for themselves: 1,800 Palestinians dead since the latest conflict began, 70% of whom were civilians; fewer than 70 Israelis killed of whom only three were civilians.  No wonder the mainstream media is giving the Israeli attacks a mixed review. And it’s no wonder anti-Semitic acts have increased in Europe.  The contrast between 1,800 and 70 feeds the imaginations of anti-Semites everywhere. It makes Hamas even more recalcitrant and it encourages the funders of terrorism to give more money to their violent clients.

In short, the Israeli way to meet a slap with a sledgehammer has never worked and never will work. It would have been much better if Israel had reacted to the act that started the latest wave of violence—the kidnapping and killing of three boys—with a more studied, more nuanced approach.  First and foremost, it should have insisted on due process to find and punish the killers of the boys. By not bombing civilian targets, it would have won the admiration of many in the West for restraint and perhaps convinced the other side that it was willing to consider a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem. Secondly, it might have considered using drones to target known terrorists in civilian areas or tried some surgical operations similar to when it dismantled a Syrian nuclear reactor years ago.

But instead of trying to think of new approaches, Israel and the United States have both decided to default to the unworkable. And so “business as usual” continues in Israeli and the occupied lands and returns to Iraq. It’s a bloody status quo that shows absolutely no signs of transforming into something better.  
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