Saturday, January 25, 2014

Selections from the February 15, 2014 issue






DISPATCHES
Obamacare hater now thinks it’s a godsend;
Medicaid enrollment soars;
McAuliffe seeks to expand Medicaid in Virginia;
GOP panic over Christie troubles;
HealthCare.gov passes security test;
Schweitzer as ‘anti-Obama’;
DeVos clan plans to defund Left;
Republicans see Senate opportunities;
Supreme Court may deal another blow to workers;
Chemical company ducks regs and responsibility;
Things fall down, things blow up;
Nebraska Dems get Senate candidate;
'Blue slip' is new barricade in GOP judicial obstruction;
Four years after 'Citizens United,' move to take big money out of politics;
Voter rights compromise has good and bad;
Bipartisan commission: early voting prevents chaos;
James Lankford: wrong on everything;
Supreme Court denies organic farmers defense against GMO suits ...

JOHN YOUNG
Disagree with military brass? How dare he?
DON ROLLINS
West Virginia’s toxic waters just another slight
BILL JOHNSTON
Choose the economy that works for you







Thursday, January 23, 2014

Mass media gets high on stories about marijuana

By Marc Jampole

Marijuana, lauded, rued and feared as an appetite stimulant, is causing the news media to get a major case of the munchies.  A pot-crazed mass media is chowing down on the devil weed as if it were a bottomless bowl of Toll House chocolate chip cookies.

A media feeding frenzy occurs when a story becomes so big that every media outlet looks for a new and different angle for covering it. News junkies begin to feel as if they are drowning in stories about the topic, as everywhere they turn another media outlet is blasting or reblasting a story. It can leave one dizzy, disoriented, maybe feeling a little stoned.

Some media feeding frenzies last a few days or weeks, like the recent outbreak of Cyrus-twerking. Others last the length of a trial or a campaign. Others like Watergate—and perhaps now Bridgegate—go on far longer than anyone suspected they would when they first emerged.  In my lifetime, the longest feeding frenzy was the coverage of the emergence of AIDS: the mass media literally produced at least one new story about some aspect of AIDS every day during the 1990s.

A year and even six months ago, gay marriage dominated feature news coverage. Now it’s marijuana.

If you don’t believe me, go to Google News and key in one word: marijuana. More than 41.3 million stories will pop up. The following sample of story topics come from the first few pages of the search, and all have appeared within the past 72 hours. Many stories on this list appeared multiple times, as the news media consists largely of reprints and repackagings of other stories, with very little original content reported:

What distinguishes a media feeding frenzy from normal news coverage is the great lengths that journalists will go to find or create a connection that involves the target of the frenzy. For example, we see just about every approach to feature news coverage in this list: Legislation, personality profiles, business aspects, dueling politicians, celebrity interest, law enforcement, health and the bizarre and quirky. All that’s missing are consumer features, such as comparisons of cooking recipes, quality of pot strains (brands) and where and what the hip people imbibe; what I call “sell” journalism: stories dedicated to helping someone sell a good or service. But these will come, just as we are now seeing stories on goods and service related to gay courtship and marriage. 

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

NY Times reviewer feels he has to remind us that anyone who watches serious theater is a snob

By Marc Jampole

As New York Times culture reporter Dave Itzkoff details in “To See or Not to See? A Season for High Art,” New York City theaters—Broadway and off—are currently offering an unusually large number of productions of what many call “serious” drama, which means plays that tackle serious subjects in nonconventional or experimental styles or belong to the “canon” of classic world literature.

The language of serious theater is often elevated, sometimes strange. The characters portray both positive and negative traits. The endings are often unhappy or ambiguous. Serious theater tends to make viewers think about deep philosophical or social issues. Among playwrights considered to be authors of serious works are Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tennessee Williams and Berthold Brecht, all of whose works are in production in New York City at this time.  

And how does Itzkoff describe this amazing cornucopia of high dramatic art? “The current theater season has been a veritable snob’s paradise.”

A snob’s paradise!!

To understand just how anti-intellectual this statement is, we have to review all three meanings of the word “snob” given in Merriam-Webster’s (or any other standard) dictionary:
1.      “Someone who tends to criticize, reject, or ignore people who come from a lower social class, have less education, etc.”
2.      “One who blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those regarded as social superiors”
3.      “A) One who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior; B) One who has an offensive air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste”

Snobs criticize those they think beneath them. Snobs fawningly imitate and chase those considered socially superior. Snobs have an offensive air of superiority. Snobs are thus among the most distasteful and despicable people in the world.

Who would want to be a snob? Yet “snob” is the first word that comes to mind to a writer about culture when describing those who like serious theater.

Admittedly, serious theater engages our intellectual faculties more than light theater or most musicals do. Sometimes serious theater is hard to understand. To call serious theater an intellectual pursuit is accurate.

But why is someone a snob by virtue of liking serious theater or preferring it to light theater?

It’s just another of the almost daily examples of mainstream media criticizing intellectual pursuits.  Reporters and pundits go out of their way to say denigrating things about intellectual activities.

That it’s a cultural reporter who should find excitement in Beckett and Shakespeare who is delivering the blow against these authors, and by implication against intellectualism, is also nothing new.  In the recent past we have seen a sciencewriter imply that brilliant people have no common sense and an education expert say people don’t need algebra. Mass media editors like nothing more than finding and then funding a self-flagellating expert who will denigrate his or her intellectual discipline.

Calling serious theatergoers snobs is a throwaway line in an article which focuses primarily on the business aspects of having so many productions of serious theater in town over a short time frame. For example, he discusses the marketing challenges of the Pig Iron theater’s production of “Twelfth Night,” which follows by a few weeks the closing of the acclaimed Elizabethan-style version imported from London with Tony-winner Mark Rylance. 

Itzkoff, the culture critic, does not consider the cultural implications of the seemingly sudden return to serious theater—that audiences may be tired of the flash and glitz of Broadway musicals or that a new generation of theatergoers is now discovering the joys of Odets, Albee and Ibsen (three other “serious” playwrights whose work has popped up on New York stages in the recent past). Did the trend start in the hinterland or has New York become the last American bastion of classic drama, much as it has for serious post-bop jazz?  There are so many approaches that Itzkoff could have taken to exploring this sudden and wonderful outcrop of serious theater. But he decided to write about the one topic held above all others by mass culture— making money.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

NY Review author details extent of government financing crisis & a centrist way out

By Marc Jampole

If you read one article this month—change that to this year—make it Jeffrey D. Sachs’ “Our Dangerous Budget and What to Do About It” in the New York Review of Books. 

Sachs, Director of Columbia University’s The Earth Institute, takes a look at the federal budget and tax revenues as percentages of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and compares the numbers to historic patterns and what the numbers are in other countries. He then makes assumptions about future inflation and concludes that within 10 years the federal government will be spending money on the military, interests payments on debt, mandatory social programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and nothing else. No aid to education. No construction or repair of bridges, roads and dams. No support of alternative energy. No national parks. No federal support of medical or scientific research. No National Science Foundation. No weather satellites. We will cease investing in the future of the United States and the result will be that we enter a rapid decline.

He starts with the fact that federal, state and local tax revenues are now a mere 30% of GDP, much less than before what he rightfully calls “Ronald Reagan’s successful assault on government beginning in 1981,” and much lower than Canada’s 38%, Germany’s 45% and Denmark’s 55%.  We average a mere 18-20% a year of GDP in federal taxes.

Sachs takes a look at the federal spending pie and finds that mandatory programs accounted for 9.6% of GDP in 1980, but have soared to 13.6%. The aging of the population and the fact that people are living longer has a lot to do with that increase, but so does medical inflation. Sachs tell us that we spend 18% of GDP on health care, compared to 12% in other high income countries, although he forgets to mention that these other countries all have longer life spans and lower infant mortality.

Adding the 5% of the GDP that we spend on military and that adds up to almost 19% of GDP, or just about all of our federal revenues. That doesn’t leave much for all that other stuff I listed above.

But wait, it gets worse! Thanks to the Federal Reserve Board’s program of quantitative easing, interest rates have been historically low. Quantitative easing has to end and it looks as if it may end sooner than later. When the Fed does pull the plug on bond buying, interest rates will return to what Sachs expects will be an historically normal 4%. At that point, interest on the national debt will account for 3.1% of GDP. By 2023, if we do nothing, we will have absolutely no money to spend on anything but guns, health care, retirement and interest.

Sachs lists four ways out of this untenable situation, three of which he rejects:
1.      Continue on the current course, which will doom us to a backwards economy with unskilled people in a degraded environment.
2.      Fund more of what the beltway crowd label discretionary spending through borrowing more money.  Sachs worries about the increase in the debt to GDP ratio. I worry more about the fact that borrowing money to fund government spending transfers money from the poor and middle class to the wealthy, even when the money is spent on these less financially secure groups. Here’s why: Instead of raising taxes on the wealthy, we borrow money from them, giving them a rock solid investment. The loan and all interest are eventually paid back by all of us.
3.      Cut spending on Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and other “mandatory programs” (which essentially means programs for which spending levels are voted into law not subject to annual budgeting) to fund the discretionary programs like education, environmental protection, infrastructure improvement and research. As Sachs points out, the Republicans like this approach, but he forgets to mention why: because it takes from the undeserving (read: minority) poor.

Sachs’ approach is the right one: Raise taxes and cut military and healthcare costs. He proposes a one percent wealth tax on any individual with a net worth of $5 million and more, a tax on financial transactions and the end of preferential tax treatment of multi-national corporations and hedge fund owners.  His military cuts leave the United States as the preeminent military power in the world, with offensive capabilities much greater than any other nation.  His medical cuts do not bring our medical costs down to European levels and involve changing how we pay for health care from a fee-for-service model to one price for every patient.

With this combination of cuts and tax increases, Sachs is able to squeeze out 5% of GDP to invest in education, technology, infrastructure, jobs, mass transit and everything else in which we currently need to invest.

Sachs plan is too centrist, if you ask me. A lot of damage has been done over the last 30 years by privatizing money—taking it out of the public coffers where it was used for public ends and giving it to the wealthy, thin sliver of the  population who didn’t really need it. I would also propose lifting the cap on income assessed the Social Security tax and end the capital gains tax for any investment in the secondary market (as opposed to buying an initial stock or bond offering). I would also raise the basic tax rate on just about everyone making more than $150,000 a year. I would cut the military even more than Sachs proposes. I would use these additional revenues and cost savings to ratchet up investment in education, mass transit and the environment.

These differences are more than minor quibbles—they represent the difference between a pre-Reagan American centrist and a European-style social democrat. But Sachs’ proposal is a good start, and it seems to be considerably to the left of our supposedly progressive President.

Sachs ends with the hope that there is truth in Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s well-known statement that we have 30-year cycles of private greed followed by 30-year periods of public service.  He sees the election of Bill De Blasio as Mayor of New York City as a possible harbinger of a swing leftward.  Judging from the many surveys by Pew and others, Sachs may be a little too optimistic. The country has been tilting left for years, but even as it does our politicians have driven the conversation right and one of our two major parties has attempted to disenfranchise those voters most likely to vote for progressive candidates. Days after De Blasio’s inauguration, the Governor of New York state—a Democrat—came out with a plan to cut taxes in that state further.

Considering our current political alignment, Sachs plan looks pretty good. I suggest that everyone copy it and send it to all their elected officials with a note that if they want the vote and donations, they have to come out explicitly and loudly for the Sachs plan.

Sunday, January 19, 2014

How Did Texas Get Into This Mess and Who Will Lead Us Out?



By JIM CULLEN

(from a speech to the First Unitarian Church of Austin, Jan. 19, 2014, a revision and updating of "What's the Matter with Texas")

When I moved to Texas 42 years ago to attend the University of Dallas, you could tell when you were entering the Lone Star State because the quality of the pavement improved.

Since then the state's dedication to highway quality has deteriorated along with its road surfaces, to the point where the American Society of Civil Engineers last year found that 38% of Texas roads are in poor or mediocre condition. The state has not raised fuel taxes from the 20 cents a gallon dedicated to roads since 1991, so the Texas Department of Transportation under Republican Gov. Rick Perry has had to contract with foreign financiers to put the cash up front to build and operate state tollways and the state has floated plans to convert at least 80 miles of paved roads in South and East Texas to gravel because it lacks the funds to repair damage done by oilfield vehicles. 

The Texas economy grew by 13% from 2009 to 2012, the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis reported last June. Much of the state’s job growth came due to the revival of the state's oil fields with the environmentally dangerous fracking process, but the state also saw large gains in service jobs, which tend to be relatively low-paid and less likely to offer insurance benefits. The state’s jobless rate topped out at 8.5% in August 2011, when the national unemployment rate was 9%, but by November 2013 the Texas unemployment rate had dropped to 6.1%, compared with 7% nationally.

Austin has led the high-tech economic boom, which was due to the state’s investments in the University of Texas and high-tech research centers in the 1980s. It's important to remember that 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 state's institutions of higher learning.

A student in those days could get a bachelor’s degree while accumulating little or no debt. 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.) Tuition and fees rose to $2,357 a semester by 2002 (that works out to 458 hours at the $5.15 minimum wage). But a student could still pay tuition and fees at a Texas university by working 20 hours a week, not counting room and board.

After Republicans gained control of the Texas Legislature in 2003, with Rick Perry as governor, the Legislature “deregulated” tuition. Since then the Legislature has cut appropriations for the state’s universities to less than 15% of the costs, the opposite of its share in the '70s, with students picking up most of the balance. In 2012, the average cost for a semester for a state resident was $7,533, an increase of 55% since deregulation. (That’s the equivalent of 1,039 hours at the minimum wage of $7.25.) The estimated cost of undergraduate education at the University of Texas in 2013, including campus housing, was at least $25,704. 

The Texas Legislature should step up to restore the state's share of the cost of higher education and make it affordable to students working no more than 20 hours a week. At the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, that means tuition should be no more than $3,625 a semester (or $7,250 a year).

Instead, Texas legislators in 2011 cut $5 billion from public schools and $1 billion from universities, choosing not to draw from the state's $8 billion "Rainy Day Fund" to support education during the Great Recession. Instead, the state's public schools lost 21,000 teachers and staff while Texas universities also faced cutbacks. The Legislature restored most of those cuts in the 2013 session, but the indifference to education as a budget priority could make it harder to find qualified teachers and professors in the next decade.

The proportion of adults without a high school diploma is projected to increase from 12% today to 30% in 2040, if current trends continue, the state Comptroller’s office reported. That report also predicted another 30% of the 2040 labor force will have only a high school diploma and no training for high-tech jobs.

Rick Perry also brags that Texas has generated 37% of the country’s new jobs since 2009, but he is less forthcoming about the 25% of Texas residents who lack health insurance. That ranks Texas dead last among the states in the percentage of insured residents. Texas has a high number of retail and service jobs, as well as a large agricultural sector, and those are industries that are less likely to offer health benefits. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that 71% of Texas uninsured are part of a family that includes a full-time worker. Put another way, 63% of uninsured, working-age Texans have a job — they just don't have a job that provides insurance.

Texas' 25% uninsured compares with a national average of 17% uninsured. Those 6.3 million uninsured Texans amount to a population nearly equal to the entire state of Massachusetts.

And Perry and state Attorney General Greg Abbott have done worse than nothing to make health insurance more affordable for working Texans. They promoted a 2003 law that caps medical malpractice awards, making it harder for injured patients to recover damages from negligent physicians. That arbitrary $250,000 limit on punitive damages gives lawyers little incentive to take malpractice cases. But so-called “tort reform” has not controlled health care costs — since 2003, Texas Medicare reimbursements have actually been rising faster than the rest of the country, Public Citizen reported in December 2009.

It's ironic, to say the least, that Abbott, who is now running for governor, supports these limits on damage awards. He got a $9 million settlement in 1986 from a property owner and a tree service in Houston after a tree fell on him, paralyzing him and requiring him to use a wheelchair. 

Perry and Abbott also have taken the lead in opposing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that Texas has 22 of the 30 counties in the United States that would benefit most from implementation of the health reform. Perry has refused billions of dollars the federal government is offering to pay nearly the entire cost of expanding Medicaid to cover the working poor — that's up to 133% of the poverty level — for the first three years. A study done for the Commonwealth Fund reported in December that Texas would pass up $9.6 billion in federal matching funds in 2022 if it continues to refuse Medicaid expansion.  As attorney general, Abbott led the efforts to block the health reform law in the courts. Now he is working to block “navigators,” many of whom work for non-profit organizations, from helping potential customers find the insurance plan and federal subsidy that’s right for them.

Texas always has been stingy in its Medicaid program. Texas Medicaid in 2012 covered 3.6 million Texans, mainly children, pregnant women, seniors in long-term care and disabled Texans, mainly sticking with the federally mandated minimums. And Perry would like to do away with those requirements. Now he and Abbott are trying to prevent as many as 1.5 million people earning poverty wages from getting health coverage paid by the federal government.

As if to add a cruel twist to the obstruction, the Republican-dominated Legislature in 2011 cut $73.6 million from family health services. The cuts were supposed to be targeted at Planned Parenthood abortion services, but they ended up defunding 22 public health clinics that provide a broad range of services in Texas and they have reduced health care options for low-income Texas women.

Rick Perry boasted that the state had targeted Planned Parenthood. “There are 12 abortion clinics that aren’t open in the state of Texas today because our members of the Legislature had the courage, the wisdom to do that,” he said, referring to the defunding.

Jordan Smith noted in the Austin Chronicle that Perry’s bragging may have pleased his hardcore base, but it was false. In fact, 11 Planned Parenthood clinics had folded operations in Texas because of the budget cuts — including six near the Mexican border, where the need is great and there are few other options for care — but none of those clinics provided abortions. Instead, those clinics provided health exams to 20,565 clients, including screenings for cervical cancer; screenings for breast cancer; and screenings and treatments for sexually transmitted infections. But not any more.

The Legislature in 2013 appropriated $71 million for family planning services, nearly reinstating the money the Legislature had cut in 2011, but the state also lost $60 million from the federal government because it defunded the clinics that were affiliated with abortion providers, TexasTribune.org reported. The state Family Planning Services Program is expected to serve 100,000 women in 2014, down from 220,000 women before the 2011 cuts, the Dallas Morning News reported.

The state has low tax rates, as the average Texan spends just 7.9% of his income on state and local taxes, compared with 9.8% nationally, according to the Tax Foundation. That 7.9% is up from 7.1% when Perry became governor in 2001. But only five states have lower tax burdens. And you get what you pay for.

Texas has relatively low housing costs, ranking 40th in median home prices. Texas was not hit as hard by the collapse in housing prices as other states where housing prices were inflated by speculators. A large part of the credit goes to Texas' relatively strict regulation of home equity loans. The state limits “cash out” refinancing, where homeowners could take advantage of higher house prices to refinance their homes and pocket the difference. 

Texas had a populist mistrust of bankers since the days of the Republic. The state did not allow home equity loans until 1997 and then Democrats, in one of their last populist stands before the Republicans took over, insisted on limits that made it harder for bankers to misuse home equity loans. (Perry was agriculture commissioner at the time and was not a leader in the home equity debate.) In Texas, cash-outs and home equity loans cannot total more than 80% of a home’s appraised value and borrowers cannot use the refinance to pay other debts.

Many people confuse the demagoguery of politicians such as Perry, Sen. Ted Cruz and the Tea Party movement with populism. These faux populists have turned the definition of populism on its head and it’s time that progressives reclaim the good name of populism.

Since the late 19th century, populists have believed that government should protect working people, small businesses and family farmers and ranchers from predatory corporations. Right-wing business executives such as the Koch Brothers founded FreedomWorks and other organizations that have tried to turn that populist tradition on its head in organizing the Tea Party movement to protect corporations from government regulation.

The Tea Party movement, whether its members realize it or not, is largely in the service of corporate interests in its campaign against “big government” and health-care reform.

They have embraced the right-wing dogma that big government is bad and that the free market is the best regulator. That is the opposite of progressive populism, which believes that the government should protect working people, farmers and small businesses from predatory corporations.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, enacted in February 2009, provided an $800 billion stimulus to the economy. That was a good start and helped to stabilize the economy, but going forward the government needs to put people back to work building or rebuilding highways, bridges, schools and other public works. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US needs to spend at least $3.6 trillion on rebuilding infrastructure just to get it back to code. In Texas, we don't even have a state fire code that allows fire marshals to inspect potentially explosive sites outside of city limits. The Republican Legislature didn't get off the dime to act, even after the fertilizer plant explosion that leveled much of the little town of West, Texas, on April 17.

Democrats should promote development of high-speed railways and a clean energy industry. President Obama's proposal for a $450 billion jobs act is the minimum Congress should approve, but they should also toughen regulations on Wall Street and help small businesses gain financing from the Small Business Administration if private lenders are not up to the task.

Recovery will be expensive, and this is no time to worry about the debt we’re passing onto our children. Those kids are better off if the government ensures that their parents have a good job with a living wage, health care, an affordable home and the kids have access to quality education from pre-kindergarten through college.

Texas is a cornerstone of Republican power nowadays, but that hegemony depends on suppressing the Latino electorate, which runs two-thirds Democratic when they get out to vote. Hispanics represent 38% of the Texas population, but they accounted for only 20% of Texas voters in 2012. In Texas, less than 55% of voting-eligible Hispanics registered to vote that year, the Census Bureau reported. That’s 12 points less than all eligible Texas voters and almost 19 points less than eligible Anglo voters.

If Hispanics had turned out at the same rate as whites in 2012, it would have meant an additional one million votes in Texas, where Mitt Romney defeated President Obama won by 1.2 million votes. Romney probably still would have won Texas, but he might have needed more money to secure the Lone Star State. And those million extra Latino voters might not have turned the tide in the US Senate race, where Cuban-Canadian Ted Cruz defeated East Texan Paul Sadler by 1.24 million votes, but that kind of movement might have lured some national Democratic money to help the cash-strapped Texas Democrat put up a fight.

It is hard to figure out how Republicans regain the White House without Texas’ 38 electoral votes and the numbers are starting to stack up against the GOP. Latinos make up 38% of the population while African Americans are 12%. White Texans voted 26% for Obama in 2008 but in January 32% of respondents told Public Policy Polling they were Democrats, with 43% Republican (1/30). Some of the organizers from President Obama’s campaign have relocated to Texas to try to replicate some of their grassroots organizing successes that helped turn around Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.

Meanwhile, the Republican answer is to redouble voter suppression efforts such as requiring state-issued photo IDs to vote. Just two hours after the right-wing Supreme Court majority threw out the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement in June, state Attorney General Greg Abbott said the state would go ahead and implement the controversial voter ID law that the federal courts had blocked in 2012 because the judges found it would discriminate against black and Latino voters.

Some day, this contempt for the Latino vote is bound to backlash on the Republicans. Irish Americans have been voting Democratic because of what Republicans did to their great-great grandparents 160 years ago, and Republicans, with their shocking disrespect for President Obama, have finished off most of the good will African Americans had remembered for the party of Lincoln. Today the Republican vote suppressers and DREAM deniers are doing their best to turn new generations of Mexican Americans against the GOP.

Pundits are playing down Texas Democrats’ chances of getting competitive in the next few election cycles, even with state Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Fort Worth) making a name for herself with her much-admired filibuster against the Republican railroaders and exciting Texas women with her campaign for governor. But white Texans who have been voting Republican for the past few election cycles grew up voting Democratic and they still might be receptive to a blue streak if a candidate gave them a good reason to vote Democratic again. And if Democrats can count on teabaggers such as Congressmen Steve King of Iowa and Louie Gohmert of northeast Texas with their demeaning rhetoric about immigration reform to create a whole new generation of Latino Democrats, Texas could find itself on the fast track toward turning purple.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Right-wing persists in pushing charter schools and cuts to education budgets

By Marc Jampole

When it comes to education, it seems as if the right is more interested in ideological posturing than in actually helping to give children the knowledge and skills they need to live in the modern world, have rewarding careers and achieve their version of ‘’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as Thomas Jefferson so eloquently put it.

These past days have brought two more examples of the blind ideological furor which drives purveyors of the politics of selfishness when it comes to education. In both cases, government bodies are taking actions that all credible research shows do not work in improving student performance in the classroom or on standardized tests.

Let’s start with Phoenix, Arizona. The state of Arizona is the poster child for the failure of charter schools. The research shows that charter schools in the state significantly underperform public schools. While proponents of charter schools can cite one or two charter schools nationally which outperform their public school districts, none are in Arizona, where the performance of charter schools is truly dismal. 

So what is the Phoenix school district doing to help students living in poor neighborhoods? Giving them charter schools, which until now have mostly been in the middle class sections of Phoenix—primarily, I assume, so that middle class whites could avoid having their children associate with minorities. 

Why would Phoenix want to expand a concept that has proven not to work? My answer: those in control of the Phoenix school board and Phoenix government care more about breaking the teachers’ union than educating kids. Charter schools generally are exempt from having to hire teachers in the union and so are used in most areas as a wedge to break the union. The advantage to the charter school operator is the ability to pay teachers less and reallocate the money to higher salaries for the administration and, in the case of for-profit charters, to profit for the owners.

Let’s move on to Kansas, where the state legislature and Governor Sam Brownback have cut the money for public schools per student so low that a judge has ruled the allocation unconstitutional because the Kansas constitution explicitly requires the legislature to finance the educational interests of the state. Like all opponents of public school spending, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is wringing its hands over the court decision, claiming that “If there's one certain conclusion from the last 30 years of education reform, it is that more money doesn't yield better student results.” This statement is a half lie: What the studies show is that spending more money per student doesn’t help to improve performance unless the money is spent in the classroom—that is, for more teachers to lower teacher/pupil ratios and for new and better books and other learning materials. Spending in the classroom does improve performance. The Kansas legislators and their supporters may or may not care about Kansas children who can’t afford private schools, but they certainly care a lot about enforcing the right-wing ideological principal that the government must continually cut taxes and never raise them. 

Money enters into the Arizona situation as well, as the state spends 17 percent less on public education than the national average and had the country’s largest drop in funding from 2002 to 2012 despite a 12 percent increase in enrollment. If Arizona increased support of public schools and used the additional money to hire more teachers, it would have a better chance of raising school performance than would establishing more charter schools, a failed experiment. But Republicans, who dominate the legislatures in both Arizona and Kansas, would rather keep taxes at historic lows than care for the children in their charge.

We see ideology trump facts every day, whether it is some pseudo-expert proposing that environmental regulations hurt the economy (false) or that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to job creation (even more false). The news media suborns this reign of ignorance by telling both sides of the story, even when the one side is full of poppycock—for example by giving equal say to ignorant opponents of childhood vaccination as they do to infectious disease experts or by publishing tirades against the concept of climate change.

But let’s not get too hung up on this right-wing obsession with hewing to disproven notions for ideological reasons, lest we forget that in this case the victims are our children. Of course, if the Arizona and Kansas powers-who-be thought the children involved were theirs, they would act differently. But they think and have convinced the voting public that the children belong to some undeserving other—poor and minority—who are not part of their real America. We should therefore not contemplate the state of right-wing educational reform with intellectual arrogance, but with a burning shame that so many children of all races and backgrounds in America are being denied the opportunity to fulfill the dream that slaveholder Jefferson had for white males.

And why? So we can keep taxes low for “them that got,” to quote Billie Holiday’s song.  Few in power in Kansas and Arizona are blessing the child.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Wall Street Journal diverts class warfare with claim that middle class pays for poor to attend college

By Marc Jampole

A Wall Street Journal article is reimagining university finances as a wealth transfer program that steals from the rich and middle class to give to the poor. In doing so, writer Douglas Belkin attempts to reframe the current class war in the United States. 

Belkin’s argument starts with the fact that government has withdrawn massive subsidies from public universities in recent years. Belkin does not mention that this cutback resulted from an historic lowering of taxes on the wealthy.  The way that public universities made up the shortfall from reduced government subsidies was to raise tuition. But, as many American families understand with painful clarity, that pushed tuition out of reach of many deserving students. Universities have responded by giving tuition breaks to more and more working class and poor students.

The article quotes from both poor students who say they wouldn’t be able to attend college without the tuition breaks and from students whose families make amounts that are just out of reach for qualifying for needs-based aid. One student bemoans the irony of her tuition payments subsidizing poorer students while she will graduate with educational loans to pay. The article seems to postulate that the sole reason for tuition increases has been to make sure middle class and rich students pay enough to carry their poorer cohorts.

Following the money is often helpful in understanding a situation, but in this case, the Journal has only followed half the money trail, the half after tax cuts have gutted state and federal budgets. When we follow the complete unvirtuous cycle that has radically changed the nature of college finances over the past 30 years we see that the real transfer of wealth has not been down the ladder but up the ladder. Rich folk pay less in taxes, and the middle class and poor pay more in tuition. When we consider that rich folk represent a higher percentage of private school students, which enjoy no or limited government support, the redistribution of wealth upwards intensifies. Moreover, it is naïve to think that most poor state school students get enough of a tuition break to make up for the obscene inflation in college costs over recent decades.

Behind the Journal’s partial and partisan math looms the politics of selfishness, the benighted idea that it always unfair to make a citizen pay for another citizen.  The ideology of selfishness informs and shapes the entire article. It describes the efforts of students in Texas and protestors in other states to fight what the article calls “set-asides,” funds earmarked from tuition to pay for tuition discounts for needy students.  The article quotes Ronald Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute; “We used to believe that public higher education benefited all residents of a state, not only the people who were attending, because the more highly educated workforce meant more economic growth…But now our society has moved toward the notion that the people who are paying are the ones who will benefit, so they should pay.”  

The idea that society does not benefit from an educated workforce is complete nonsense and a dangerous notion. More dangerous, though, is the underlying idea that group solutions to public challenges are inherently unfair. The typical family will need public college for 4-12 years, depending on how many children they have. Most people couldn’t possible afford to pay for a high quality education over that amount of time. Fortunately, most people remain in the work force for 40-45 years, giving them extra time to pay their fair share in taxes. Cutting taxes and making people pay for their or their children’s college education over a much shorter time will naturally lead to financial problems.  The Journal wants us to blame those problems on the poor, when it fact they have emerged primarily because the wealthy have decided to retreat from the social contract which ruled this country from the end of the Great Depression to the mid 1970s.  


Conservatives like to blame the poor and like even more to pretend that the best interests of the middle class are different from those of the poor and working class.  They want to pit the poor against the middle class, so neither will realize who is perpetrating the real class war. But the college financial crisis has as its root cause the same dynamic that has led to our sluggish job recovery, the increased inequality of wealth, our public school challenges and our decaying infrastructure of mass transit, bridges and roads: Taxes are too low, especially on the wealthy, and have been for many years now. As a nation, we have replaced the social contract that created a middle class nation with a dog-eat-dog, I’m-only-in-it-for-myself ideology that helps the rich take more.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Editorial: Learn From History


If, as the French poet Baudelaire once wrote, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick that plutocrats ever pulled was to convince working people they cared about the working class’s best interests.

And, to paraphrase Santayana, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to vote Republican. Those who fail to learn from economics become senior fellows at the Heritage Institute and pontificate on the Sunday morning talk shows.

Seventy years ago, on Jan. 11, 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt, in the midst of World War II, laid out to Congress his vision for an Economic Bill of Rights that would establish an American standard of living higher than ever before.

“We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people — whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth — is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure,” Roosevelt said.

He proposed “a second Bill of Rights,” which would assure, among other things, the right to a job; the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing, recreation and a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and the right to a good education.

Roosevelt died 15 months later, before he could solidify the rights established in his New Deal. He had gotten Congress to approve many reforms such as the Social Security Act of 1935, which supported retirees. lifting many of them out of poverty; creation of federal agencies such as the Works Progress Administration that gave jobs to eight million unemployed people during the Great Depression; labor laws established the right of workers to organize into unions; a price-support system kept farmers on the land; a federal minimum wage was a step toward a living wage; banks and the stock market were regulated; bank deposits were insured; antitrust laws were tightened; the GI Bill of Rights provided education, housing, job training and other benefits for millions of veterans returning from World War II; and tax rates increased to 94% for the wealthiest individuals to help pay for it.

Since then the plutocrats have worked tirelessly to rescind many of the reforms of the New Deal that helped create the middle class. Republicans regained control of Congress in 1947 and passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which restricted the rights of unions to organize and conduct strikes, over President Harry Truman’s veto. Congress reduced the top marginal tax rate to 91% during the postwar economic boom of the 1950s. That tax rate not only paid the bills but also encouraged the rich to plow profits back in their businesses, which created more good-paying jobs.

Fifty years ago, on Jan. 8, 1964, Lyndon Johnson called for a War on Poverty and took advantage of a Democratic landslide in the 1964 elections to make another run at implementing Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights. His Great Society programs addressed civil rights, consumer protection, education, the environment, housing, medical care, urban problems, rural development and transportation. The laws included the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Food Stamp Act and establishment of Medicare and Medicaid.

Johnson also agreed to reduce the top tax rate from 91% to 70%. That’s where the rates largely stayed until Ronald Reagan agreed with Congress in 1982 to reduce the top individual rate to 50% — and further to 28% in 1988.

In Bill Clinton’s first year in the White House, Democrats increased the top rate to 39.6% for the top 1.2% of wage earners and cut taxes for small businesses and the poor. The budget passed without a single Republican vote as GOP leaders predicted the tax increase would plunge the nation further into a recession. “This is the Democrat machine’s recession, and each one of them will be held personally accountable,” Rep. Newt Gincrich, who has a Ph.D. in history, said. Rep. Dick Armey, who has a Ph.D. in economics, predicted, “The banks will fail. Clinton’s plans will only worsen the recession.” Sen. Phil Gramm, who also has a Ph.D. in economics, agreed: “Clinton’s pie-in-the-sky fantasies will crash our economy.”

Instead, of course, the economy boomed in the Clinton years. The unemployment rate achieved a 30-year low of 3.9% in April 2000. The higher tax rates balanced the budget from 1998 through 2001, when he turned over a $128 billion surplus to new President George W. Bush in fiscal 2001. Then Bush cut the tax rates, which plunged the budget back into the red, and he gutted regulatory agencies. The free market finally got a chance to regulate itself, which allowed financial excesses that resulted in the Wall Street crash of 2008 and the Great Recession. The rich got richer — the government bailed out the banks that had bet on derivatives schemes — while the ground crumbled under the middle class. And the plutocrats managed to get embittered working-class whites to blame minorities and President Obama for their hard times.

Republicans are claiming that the War on Poverty was a failure, but census figures show the Great Society helped to reduce the poverty rate from 19.5% in 1963 when Johnson became president to 12.1% in 1969, when Richard Nixon became president. Poverty bottomed at 11.1% under Nixon in 1973 and climbed back to 15.2% in 1983 as Ronald Reagan dismantled many of the Great Society welfare programs. The poverty rate under Clinton dropped from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.7% in 2001, when George W. Bush took over. Poverty increased to 14.3% in 2009, when Obama became president. It now stands at 15%, with 46 million Americans living in poverty.

Corporate profits have returned and Wall Street has boomed under Obama but despite 46 straight months of private-sector job growth, creating more than 8 million jobs, the unemployment rate remains around 7% as 12 million people are still looking for work. But Republicans have insisted on budget cuts at the state and federal level that have resulted in layoffs of 728,000 government employees. Republicans in Congress also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits that expired Dec. 28 for 1.3 million long-term unemployed Americans, which puts a further drag on economic growth. Because Republicans never learn.

End the War on Weed

Colorado has taken the first step toward demilitarizing the war on marijuana as the state has authorized selected dealers to sell as much as an ounce of cannabis to state residents and one fourth of an ounce to tourists. Washington state is planning to authorize marijuana sales this spring. Since 1970 federal authorities have claimed the authority to ban the sale or possession of marijuana as a dangerous “Schedule I” drug in the same class as heroin, LSD and methaqualone with, among other things, “no currently accepted medical use,” which is nonsense. Under Attorney General Eric Holder the Department of Justice has agreed to look the other way for what amounts to an experiment.

In addition to the revenue, legalization of marijuana could undermine Mexican cartels, which get an estimated 60% of their revenue from pot. And making marijuana available in regulated shops, similar to liquor stores, would cut the link between casual users and underworld dealers, who might push more dangerous drugs.

Democrats might as well embrace the legalization of marijuana. Polls show younger voters are more supportive of relaxing marijuana laws than older voters who are more likely to vote Republican anyway. In Texas, where it’s been 20 years since Democrats won a statewide race, Kinky Friedman, a country singer-songwriter, humorist and novelist, is running for Texas agriculture commissioner as a “Blue Dog” Democrat, on the platform of legalizing marijuana. He said it could save the state $215 million annually in enforcement costs, as well as the cost of holding 74,000 non-violent prisoners, when the state could be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue. His primary opponents are two little-known farmers who want nothing to do with the marijuana debate. Any of them would be better than the likely Republican. But for Kinky, on his third try for statewide office, legalizing weed is worth a try. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2014
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Friday, January 10, 2014

Christie forgets to apologize for creating atmosphere in which staff would consider political tricks

By Marc Jampole

We should give New Jersey Governor Chris Christie the benefit of the doubt and assume that he told the absolute truth.  He did not know members of his staff ordered the closing of a lane leading onto to the George Washington Bridge as political retribution.  When he asked about the lane closing, two members of his staff lied to him.

In his “mea culpa” news conference, New Jersey Governor Chris Christies sounded as sincere and honest as a human can appear.

But he also spoke with cunning and extreme care.

Throughout the news conference, Christie carefully parsed words and redirected questions—all with his refreshing brand of straight-talk—to avoid the topic of whether he practices political retribution. His focus was solely on the sheer stupidity of the action and the fact that people lied to him. He berated himself for creating an organizational culture in which staff members thought they could lie to him. He never addressed his role in creating a culture in which retribution was condoned and encouraged. When asked specifically about retribution against the Ft. Lee mayor, he did not speak about retribution but about the fact that he hardly knew the man. He did not deny he practiced retribution, instead suggesting that you only commit dirty tricks on someone who you know.  True enough, but it slides right over the question of whether Christie believes in dirty tricks.

Christie’s avoidance of the retribution issue reminds me of Anthony Weiner’s comments about his sexting when he first announced he was running for mayor. He said that there might be other instances revealed, but he did so in passing and parenthetically, almost hypothetically, so that it was completely ignored at the time. Weiner was deceptive in his honesty, just as Christie is. I might even say that Christie “pulled a Weiner,” but the image is just too grotesque.

The news media passed over the Weiner comment, which led to their collective shock when the next scandal involving Weiner’s electronic sexual practices popped up.  The efforts of Democrats to place the media focus on Christie’s culture of retribution is having only limited success, at least at this point. 

That someone in an organization would think that it was just business as usual to create a safety hazard and mess with the lives of tens of thousands of people is, as the Latins liked to say, res ipsa loquitur, a thing that proves itself. Either it was Christie’s habit to condone retribution or two key staff members he had known for years had somehow managed to hide a rare and malevolent stupidity from their boss and everyone else.  Christie doesn’t strike me as socially or politically dense.  His past in what many journalists are calling “rough and tumble” Morris county politics and known scandals involving others close to Christie build the case that the politics of retribution thrived in his Administration.

Bridgegate will not sink Christie’s hopes for national office. No one seriously thinks that a man this poised and clever would approve shutting down access to the most travelled bridge in the world for trivial revenge. But the news media will now go on an aggressive hunt to find other instances of Christie or his cronies using dirty tricks for political purposes. Other scandals will emerge—and it’s very possible that none will approach the notoriety of Bridgegate. But the accumulation of these past tits and tats may very well sink Christie.

Or they may enhance his status among Republicans, who seem to like dirty tricks and political pranks. It was a Republican, Andrew Breitbart, who did Fascist-style video editing to make it appear as if a minor Obama Administration official uttered racist comments. And another Republican pretended to be a pimp and asked staff at multiple ACORN offices for help getting government loans until he found someone who appeared—on the video—to take him seriously. What if not a dirty trick was the swift-boat smearing of decorated war hero John Kerry and saying he didn’t really deserve his many medals? The pain Christie officials inflicted on commuters for four relatively balmy September days is nothing compared to the suffering resulting from the dirty trick of getting Iran to keep the American hostages until after the 1980 presidential election in return for surreptitiously supplying it with weapons.


Come to think of it, Bridgegate may have raised Christie’s esteem in the eyes of many Republican political operatives and elected officials. It confirms that he has the “cojones” to do what it takes. Sincerely.  

Monday, January 6, 2014

Is reason conservatives don’t want legalized pot because as an illegal industry, it’s an unregulated free market?

By Marc Jampole

I’m about to perform a feat of rhetorical daring and originality: I’m going to proffer a written opinion about the legalization of marijuana without sharing my experiences or lack of experiences with the drug.

It seems as if virtually every pundit has to share his or her smoking history when offering an opinion or a prediction. It was started earlier this week by New York Times columnist and National Public Radio commentator David Brooks, who always looks to me as if he has indulged in the munchies a bit too often (and I mean that in a nice way!). His rationale for keeping recreational use of pot illegal is short on facts and reasoning, focusing instead on the experience of his group of friends—his clique as he calls it. They all smoked it and then moved on to their lives' work, except—in the anti-intellectual fashion of all great American myths—the one friend who was “the smartest of us,” who Brooks hints may have been destroyed by the devil weed.  It’s this one neat detail that makes me wonder about the absolute veracity of Brooks’ narrative. 

Since Brooks’ column, the Internet is reeking with reefer confessions. Joe Coscarelli, for example, excerpts from seven opinion writers who cop to blowing weed. 

It’s a continuation of the ever-growing trend of the non-fiction writer to put himself or herself into the center of a non-fiction article. As an occasional rhetorical device, making one’s reactions or personal history part of an article can evoke emotions, illuminate a theme or support an assertion. But it seems as if every other feature article now features and often begins with a long session of authorial navel-gazing: an anecdote about the writer’s own experience deep sea fishing for zebra bones or the sexual excitement she felt meeting the world’s oldest professional throat singer or how learning about the repeated torture of a preteen reminded him of the fear he felt the first time he went to the dentist. Regrettably, putting the self into every article is taught at all the finer universities. Instead of turning out creative writers, our English departments have produced a generation of hacks who depend on a single rhetorical device to spice up the facts and analysis.

Of course, Brooks is entitled to his opinion, as are all those opposed to the legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington. And it makes absolute sense that most of the vocal opponents of legalization are conservative. From restricting access to abortion to wanting to introduce religion into science education, social conservatives tend to want to control the private lives of citizens and keeping pot illegal certainly does that. Meanwhile, economic conservatives don’t want any control on the free market, and legalization always brings control—taxation, standards setting, workplace safety.

It’s ironic, but keeping pot illegal makes it an absolutely deregulated commodity.  And we can see what happens in this free market: Much of it is controlled by violent cartels. The relationship between quality and price varies significantly not just from market to market, but from sale to sale.  Buyers have no idea what they’re getting or the conditions under which it was grown and processed. Transport and distribution uses public infrastructure without paying for it, throwing part of the burden of paying for their economic transaction onto everyone’s back. 

Now that we’re talking about it, the market for illegal drugs makes a wonderful case for government regulation of the free market.

Brooks and other opponents to the legalization of marijuana line up on the wrong side of history. Remember that the United States prohibited alcohol drinking for 13 years in the early part of the 20th century. And abortion was banned for about a century, a victim to the American Medical Association’s war against midwives (see Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine). Almost a century later, senseless restrictions on how adults behave in their private lives are falling left and right: gambling, gay marriage and now pot smoking. All come with regulations, as we can see with the greater regulation of cigarette smoking. I imagine that it will never be legal to toke up in a restaurant or movie theatre. And that’s how it should be. The government should refrain from restricting private actions, even as it intervenes in public actions and interactions, including the sale and purchase of goods and services in the marketplace. 

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Pope Vs. The Devil

Graphic by Kevin Kreneck
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