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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it is wrong and unethical to buy and sell stocks based on information that the general public doesn’t have yet. It also hurts other people, especially when the insider is selling a stock that’s about to go into the tank. Near the end of his article, Manne makes the outrageous claim that insider trading does no harm and can have significant social and economic benefits.  Of course he never says what those benefits are. That’s because there are none. Insider trading has been illegal since 1934 because it is unfair and it allows the insider to profit unfairly. It is akin to getting an extra out in baseball or starting on third base. I know that a lot of Wall Street insiders did start on third base and think they hit a triple, but that sense of privilege often held by the moneyed —so many of whom are the bankers and executives who obtain the most insider information—should not and does not legally extend to special treatment as an investor.

Manne hides the lunacy of his argument behind an extended simile—the comparison of the FBI tracking bootleggers and other gangsters and the efforts of Manhattan federal prosecutor Preet Bharara to go after insider traders such as Stephen A. Cohen’s firm.  He spends a goodly number of words glorifying Elliott Ness, only to point out that Ness’ gallant activities led nowhere, since prohibition was repealed. His analogy is bogus not only because insider trading can’t be compared to drinking alcohol, but because the focal point of the comparison—Eliott Ness—didn’t really get much done. His reputation is mostly manufactured by the “untouchable” television series and movies.  In real life, he was pretty mediocre, although he did help gather evidence that put gangster Al Capone away—on charges of tax evasion!

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editorial: Open College To All

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2014

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Selections from the May 15, 2014 issue

COVER/Edward McClelland
Sears is dying with the middle class

EDITORIAL
Open college to all

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

DON ROLLINS
NRA leads Florida to zombie apocalypse

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Changing the world with your neighborhood

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

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

BOB BURNETT
War on democracy: SCOTUS weighs in

MARK ANDERSON
American workers need to say no trade deals

ELIZABETH HAND
Saved by Obamacare

WENONAH HAUTER
Don’t rubber stamp exports of fracked gas

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Smoking bans: They work

SAM URETSKY
Silence still doesn’t cure AIDS

WAYNE O’LEARY
Beware the ides of March

JOHN BUELL
Primal fears, environmental politics

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Much in common

MOVIE REVIEW/Juan Palomo
The journey of farm workers

ROB PATTERSON
Check out the ladies’ detective agency

POPULIST PICKS
Inside Llewyn Davis; Booze Built US; Jobs

and more ...

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

By Marc Jampole 

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

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

My question is why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how can the right-wing support him?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Marc Jampole

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are three problems with this view:

·         The voters have no standing and are incapable of deciding if a commercial has told an out-and-out lie. They aren’t experts in gathering and weighing evidence.

·         People vote for certain candidates for a variety of reasons. A vote is not a mandate for whether an ad contained an overt lie. It is an endorsement of one candidate over another. I can imagine many scenarios in which someone might vote for someone whose campaign was caught is a lie.

·         There is no recourse, i.e., punishment when there is no law with penalties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes a TV commercial is more entertaining than TV

By Marc Jampole

The latest version of the monster movie, Godzilla, will hit the screens sometime next month.

As a child, I used to love the cheesy Japanese Godzilla movies, but I gave up Godzilla about the same time that I picked up Catcher in the Rye and The Red and the Black.  I never go to monster, horror or sci fi movies, never read the books and channel surf away from a TV station as soon as I realize it’s playing programs of any of these related genres. I didn’t see the 2004 opus about the fantasy giant lizard that destroys Tokyo and I have no intention of seeing the latest retelling of the myth.

But I know it’s coming, thanks to perhaps the most creative and entertaining television commercial in years.

No, the commercial is not for the movie. It’s for the candy bar, Snickers. Mars, the company that manufactures Snickers, has entered into a marketing agreement to be the official candy bar of the movie.

Who knew that Godzilla ate candy?

The commercial starts with a montage of Godzilla having fun with his friends, all active and attractive twentysomething males. Godzilla flirts with a beautiful woman on the beach, it drives an all-terrain vehicle along the sand dunes, it hits a hard smash in a game of ping pong, it dances with a few girls at a house party. Godzilla is clearly the alpha male among his bunch of cool dudes.

The commercial cuts to two of Godzilla’s best buds, who hold the following conversation while gripping plastic cups of beer: First guy: “Godzilla’s actually pretty cool.”  Second guy: “Except when he’s hungry. Suddenly, we cut to scenes of Godzilla destroying a city. Someone unwraps a Snickers and tosses it to the giant lizard, who snatches the candy bar in its enormous jaws and smiles in appreciation. The action now cuts to Godzilla on jet skis, impressing all his buds with his form. We see Godzilla balanced gracefully on the jet skis, moving towards the camera, his left hand curled into a “thumbs up.”

You’d think the sugar high from eating a candy bar on an empty stomach would send the giant lizard into a hyperactive frenzy that would level not just Tokyo, but Yokohama, Osaka, Sapporo, Kobe and Kyoto as well. But not in a TV spot for a food product that its maker is shilling as the perfect way to keep up your energy. 

The final scene of jet-ski Godzilla as the hippest guy around dissolves into the sell lines:  “You’re not yourself when you’re hungry. Snickers satisfies,” followed by a reminder that the new Godzilla will be in the theaters soon.

The idea that Godzilla is a cool chick-magnet is hilarious. Also funny is the paradox of language that the commercial creates: Mars is saying that Godzilla is not himself when he’s hungry, but in fact he is himself when he’s hungry and destroying buildings with paw swipes; he transforms into a softer, nicer, different creature when fed something good and substantial, like Snickers. 

 

The pleasure derived from this very funny TV spot comes through the reference not just to the fictional character of Godzilla, but to the series of commercials that Mars has been airing for Snickers since 2010.  The series, unified by the slogan “You’re not you when you’re hungry,” shows men turning into different, less attractive people because they’re hungry. By gnawing on a Snickers, the men return to their true selves.  

So for example, a determined and focused football coach turns into Robin Williams doing one his crazy routines in which he imitates three or four characters within a few seconds, throwing off absurd statements in rapid fire succession. A Snickers turns him into a calm and focused coach again. In another spot, a guy at a party trying to connect with some girls turns into an angry, sadistic and out-of-control Joe Pesci (playing on his roles in Casino and Goodfellas).  Once he has a Snickers, he’s a charming guy, but one of the girls is now Don Rickles.  In another spot, a touch football player becomes Betty White. In England, it’s a guy in a locker room transformed into Joan Collins.  

These spots have one target market: young men. All the characters are men in groups. The situations are typically play times, like sports, parties or clubs. The solution to what’s ailing the main character—whether it’s prissiness, overly feminine behavior, confusion, incoherence or anger—comes from a male friend.  The point of view is male, and a little sexist, as several of the scenes objectify women into sex objects and in none are the women anything more than goals for conquest.

The message that the ads are trying to make is particularly pernicious:  that you can curb your hunger and return to normal by eating a candy bar with peanuts. The peanuts are good for you, to be sure, but the sugar sure isn’t. Most people would be better off having a piece of fruit, a handful of nuts or raisins, some raw vegetables or a piece of bread with chickpea spread for a snack. As the commercial suggests, it’s true that Snickers is convenient. You can carry one in your pocket or buy one almost anywhere that young men congregate. But it’s not healthy, which is the inference in returning to oneself or remaining one’s self.

But the fact that the commercial is built on a lie doesn’t prevent us from enjoying it. After all, how often do we enjoy plays or novels that glorify gangsters or, worse yet, kings and queens? (who represent the principle that some people are better than others and deserve more than others by virtue of their birth.)

So by all means, chuckle or snigger when you see Godzilla munching on a chocolate bar. Just don’t believe the message.

Obama fumbles opportunity to improve relations with Iran

By Marc Jampole

The Obama Administration made a big mistake denying a visa to Iran’s new ambassador to the United Nations, Hamid Aboutalebi. The United States should be seeking to improve our relations with Iran so that they will cease development of nuclear weapons and help us seek peaceful ways to clean up the messes in Iraq, Syria and Israeli-occupied territories. Easing tensions throughout the Middle East would free U.S. military and economic resources to address the eroding situation in Ukraine.

But beyond these considerations of what Henry Kissinger would call “Realpolitik,” there’s the simple fact that the U.S. government is wrong to interfere in the affairs of another nation.

And for what? Who is Hamid Aboutalebi? Did he engage in acts of terror funded by Mafia-like shakedowns of merchants as Menachem Begin did? Did he work with Nazis during World War II as Anwar Sadat did?

What was the horrible thing that Aboutalebi did?

As a 22-year old, he served as translator for the group of students who took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year before representatives of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan went behind the back of the duly-elected U.S. government to negotiate the illegal arms-for-hostages deal called the Iran-Contra Affair. All existing evidence points to the conclusion that Aboutalebi wasn’t even one of the core cadre of students who engineered the takeover, but was called in afterwards to provide a technical service—translation. Wikipedia reports that Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, who helped to organize and lead the embassy takeover, has said  that Aboutalebi's involvement was peripheral. In Asghararzadeh’s words, “Calling him a hostage-taker is simply wrong.”  

Now put yourself in the shoes of an idealistic and highly educated 22-year-old who has conservative religious beliefs that shape your concept of democracy and representational government. Years before, a foreign power had helped this dictator overthrow your legally elected government. The dictator then installed a decades-long violent reign of terror against all citizens, but especially religious dissidents.  For decades, the foreign power provided financial and military support to prop up this dictator. Now that your country has finally overthrown this anti-religious monster, the foreign country is harboring him and not allowing your country to extradite him. It would be as if a foreign country refused to extradite Hitler to Germany or Israel.  You did not participate in the violent takeover but you are sympathetic to the cause of the hostage-takers. And they are not asking you to carry a gun, pistol whip someone, hold a hostage’s head under water or make them crawl naked through excrement—no, none of the real torture that took place in the Bush II torture gulag. No, all you have to do is use your extensive knowledge to communicate with the other side.

Now, I’m not condoning the 1979 hostage-taking, but I do understand why a group of Iranian young people thought they were justified in storming the U.S. embassy. 

The 444-day hostage ordeal embarrassed the United States and made us a bit of a laughing stock. But it did not harm the United States the way three decades of autocratic rule by Shah Mohammad Rezi Pahlavi ruined Iranian civil life.  In the vast scheme of things, it rates far below the 9/11 attacks, the illegal bombing of Cambodia,  the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians known as the Holodomor or the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilian targets.

We are currently engaged in a process of negotiations to reduce tensions with Iran. When two enemy countries become friends, each side must in a sense, “forgive and forget” the transgressions of the other side. We of course should never forget, nor should we really “forgive” bad behavior. But what we should and often do is to put the bad stuff aside and move on. Israel and Germany are allies. We are allies with Britain, Germany and Japan, all former enemies.  Part of the process of dissolving tensions is to let “bygones be bygones.” The idea is for Iran to deal with us in a friendly manner despite the fact that we helped to suppress the country for three decades and for us to deal with Iran in a friendly manner despite the fact they embarrassed us so many years ago.

But instead of letting the sleeping dog lie, instead of moving on, the United States prefers to put additional strain on our fragile relationship with Iran by making a big deal about something non-violent that Iran’s choice for UN ambassador did more than 30 years ago when he was a young man.

It makes no sense.  

Editorial: GOP Wrong Again

After the frenzied finish of the first enrollment period under the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration on April 1 triumphantly announced that more than 7.1 million Americans had signed up for private insurance plans through the federally sponsored marketplaces. That surpassed the Congressional Budget Office’s original projection, even with the “disastrous” launch of HealthCare.gov that sidelined the website in October and much of November. As Eric Boehlert notes on page 10, the corporate media had echoed the Republican line that it would take a miracle for the marketplaces to enroll 7 million but conservatives remain in denial that the federal health reform has hit its stride.

Even before the White House announced the numbers, Sen. John Barasso (R-Wyo.), chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, on March 30 had accused the administration of “cooking the books,” a conspiracy theory that other Republicans quickly took up. After President Obama claimed the credit in the Rose Garden, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called the 7.1 million signups a “slow rolling fiasco” and “a Pyrric victory” and others continued to express doubt about the numbers. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) adopted the GOP line that enrollees don’t count until they’ve paid their first month’s premium. “We don’t know of course exactly what they’ve signed up for, we don’t know how many have paid,” McConnell said. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) agreed in a conference call with reporters, “Clearly we still don’t have information on how many of those individuals have paid their premiums.”

If many new enrollees haven’t paid their first premiums yet, it may be because the insurance companies failed to increase their staff to handle the rush of new business and get out the invoices.

Other Republicans claimed the law also forced the cancellation of millions of policies, so many of the people enrolling in the new marketplaces were simply being forced to buy a different plan. “The bulk of the people who are signing up had insurance to begin with, and they probably had their insurance canceled because of Obamacare, said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), having no numbers to back up his claim, but then again Fox and Friends hosts rarely press their Republican guests. “It is abundantly clear this thing isn’t working,” Cruz added. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, GOP Virginia Senate candidate Ed Gillespie, Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) all expressed similar sentiments, Sy Mukherjee noted at ThinkProgress.org.

Remember that under the old “let the buyer beware” insurance system to which Republicans would like to return, three quarters of medical bankruptcies happened to people who thought they were covered until they got sick and found they were underinsured.

The Rand Corp. on April 8 poked a big hole in the Republican argument that millions lost insurance when it reported that at least 9.3 million more Americans have health insurance than in September 2013, virtually all as a result of the law. And that’s a net figure, accommodating the less than one million Americans who lost their individual plans because of cancellations. That’s less than 1% of the US population age 18-64, Rand noted.

And most of those people lost their old, low-cost insurance plans because the plans offered junk coverage that left policyholders vulnerable in case of a real health emergency. Among the ACA’s benefits are that it requires insurance companies to stop excluding coverage for “pre-existing conditions”; it requires that policies provide free preventive care; it does away with annual and lifetime caps on coverage; it provides subsidies to help small businesses provide insurance for workers; it provides discounts on prescription medicines for seniors; and it allows people to quit dead-end jobs and start their own businesses with the assurance that they can get affordable coverage.

One of the misconceptions of the Affordable Care Act is that it was based on the individual mandate plan embraced by Republicans in the 1990s, as insurance companies allied with conservatives to successfully sidetrack Hillary Clinton's attempt to reform health care. The difference was that the Heritage Foundation's original plan in 1989 merely proposed that people be forced to buy insurance, without the standards that the Affordable Care Act required for insurance coverage 20 years later.

And in those states where the insurance plans have not proven to be affordable, due to a lack of competition among private insurance companies, states can and should develop their own public options. The law allows states in 2017 to seek “innovation waivers” to try their own paths to universal health coverage, such as statewide single-payer plans. Vermont already is developing a single-payer plan. Under Section 1332, which provides for the waivers, states must cover as many people and offer coverage as comprehensive and affordable as the old system. Qualifying states would receive the same federal funding that would have been available under the ACA.

Republicans have been reluctant to actually produce an alternative to the Affordable Care Act, knowing that anything short of expanding Medicare to cover everybody is going to illustrate the benefits of Obamacare. Ryan admitted as much in an April 4 interview with Bloomberg News’ Al Hunt. Asked if Republicans would maintain the pre-existing conditions regulations, dependent coverage extension, and other rate requirements if they replaced Obamacare, Ryan said, “You dramatically crank up the cost. And you make it hard for people to get affordable health care.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal on April 2 unveiled a conservative health care alternative which health analysts said it would cost millions of Americans to lose their existing health care plans and hurt the middle class and working poor.

Jindal’s “Freedom and Empowerment Plan” would repeal Obamacare and treat employer-sponsored coverage and nongroup insurance equally in the tax code. Repeal would cause at least 10 million people who have signed up for insurance through the new marketplaces, Medicaid expansion and the remaining individual market to lose their insurance. The substitute plan would lead many businesses to stop offering coverage altogether, Igor Volsky noted at ThinkProgress.org (April 2).

Volsky noted that the 149 million nonelderly people who obtain coverage through their jobs don’t pay taxes on their benefits. The tax subsidy, which dates back to World War 2, encourages employers to offer health insurance. Jindal proposes to eliminate the tax-exempt status of employer-sponsored plans — treating employer-sponsored benefits as taxable income — and replace it with “a standard deduction for all forms of health insurance,” which would encourage individuals to buy coverage independent of their employer plans.

Volsky noted that sicker and lower-income people would be most disadvantaged by what Jindal is offering. If the ACA’s insurance regulations were fully repealed, individuals who lost their employer-sponsored insurance would turn to the individual market, where insurers would be able once again to cherry-pick the healthiest enrollees or charge more for pre-existing conditions.

And the Republicans’ proposed tax deduction would primarily benefit people in higher tax brackets and would be worth little (or nothing) to the vast majority of uninsured, who are in the 15% tax bracket or less and would reap few, if any, rewards from Jindal’s proposal.

As Americans become more familiar with the benefits of Obamacare and realize that Republicans have been lying about it for five years, and we see working-poor Americans dying because they are shut out of Medicaid by Republican governors and legislators who compose the real death panels, voters need to ask the Republican naysayers why they never lifted a finger when they were in power to help working people get affordable health care. In the meantime, progressives around the country should follow Vermont’s lead in promoting single-payer plans in their states as the next step toward affordable universal care. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2014

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Selections from the May 1, 2014 issue

COVER/Calvin and Christian Exoo
Supreme Court out of control

EDITORIAL
GOP wrong again on Affordable Care Act

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

GILLES STOCKTON
Not so fast on Trans Pacific trade pact

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Try a digital detox

DISPATCHES
‘Obamacare’ critics, including Kochs, accept subsidies;
Money lines up against minimum wage hike;
Connecticut, Maryland pass $10.10 minimum wage;
On high court, former lobbyist guts campaign reform;
Progressive Dems move to draft Bernie Sanders for president;
Polls show good news for Dems;
Red-state voters want to expand Medicaid;
Earthquakes raise fracking fears;
N.C. regulators in no hurry to clean up coal ash spill;
Mark Udall slams AFP Obamacare pitch to China;
Fox News least accurate on climate change;
Demint: Big government didn't free slaves ... 

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Them that’s got shall get

DON ROLLINS
CVS tobacco ban contributes to common good 

BOB BURNETT
Accelerating use of renewable energy

WENONAH HAUTER
Factory farms are no chicken Shangri-La

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Scrooge, a tea party revision

SAM URETSKY
Social-net cuts endanger middle class

WAYNE O’LEARY
The GOP’s war on Medicaid

JOHN BUELL
Giving voice to climate silence

GENE NICHOL
A Tar Heel manifesto

SETH SANDRONSKY
Disputing education reform

ROB PATTERSON
Has SXSW grown out of control?

POPULIST PICKS
‘Chicago PD’; ‘Nebraska’; ‘Vice’

and more ...

Differences between red and blue states predate the Civil War

By Marc Jampole

In rereading Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution recently, I ran across an interesting description of the contrast in the society and economy between pre-Civil War North and South. Foner references the important insight of another historian, James L. Acorn, that slavery had sharply curtailed the scope of public authority in the pre-Civil War South because it produced a society of “patriarchal groupings” in which large numbers of people—all of African descent—remained under the authority of the private sector—their owners—and not subject to the government.  “With planters enjoying a disproportionate share of political power, taxes and social welfare expenditures remained low,” as did spending on public education.  Paved roads, water systems, public hospitals—all were nonexistent or much less developed than in the North before the Civil War.

Small government. Low taxes on the wealthy. Little public spending on education, infrastructure or health care. Little regulation of the economy, including none of the relationship between owners and workers. These aspects of the pre-Civil War South have come to define red state politics, which in recent years has been called Tea Party politics.  In fact, the core of red state America lies in the 11 slave-holding states that tried to secede from the United States in 1861.

Many on the left have described the Tea Party and the rest of the right wing as inherently racist, pointing to the racial code words and phrases used by Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachman, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and practically every other politician with Republican and Tea Party ties. Progressives also note the disparate impact on minorities of low taxes on the wealthy, privatization and the current shredding of the social net. 

The right denies a racist intent or tinge to the policies it supports, but let’s take a look at history.  The ideas and words of the current right are very similar to what southerners said before and during the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. The differences between red and blue state economic, political and social beliefs today largely mirror the differences between the South and North before the Civil War:  Small versus large government. Low versus high taxes. Lots of social services versus very few. All these differences developed primarily because the South had large slave-owning plantations and the North relied on free, wage-earning labor.

In other words, while the right can make their weak protests that their views are not racially based, history demonstrates that the primary reason why these views developed in these particular parts of the United States was that the economy was based on slavery. And slavery in the United States was always intimately tied to racism.  Slave-owners and their defenders believed those of African descent were inherently lesser beings than whites by virtue of their skin color and origin.  Slave owners justified their cruelty towards slaves—the whippings, the suppression of education, the rapes, the splitting of families—by racist arguments that Africans were an inferior breed.  Slave owners asserted that Africans liked their fate and would be lost in the real world without the guiding hand of their owners. All racist beliefs and all justifications for the southern economic and political system.

Apologists like George Will may reference Edmund Burke, Montesquieu and the so-called conservative nature of agrarian politics and rural values all they like. That won’t change the fact that the economy and society that developed today’s right-wing ideology was racist.  Racism was the rational engine that fueled the pre-Civil War South, and it still fuels the ideology associated with its reincarnation into red states.

In many ways, we still have a civil war in the United States.   

Lesson from Pennsylvania knife attack: We need more gun control

By Marc Jampole

I don’t mean to trivialize the injuries suffered in the knife attack perpetrated by a high school sophomore at a high school in Murrysville, Pennsylvania.  It’s another in a long and seemingly endless line of incidents of mass violence at American schools. Of the 20 students and one teacher stabbed by teenaged loony Alex Hribal, at least four have serious wounds.

But all are expected to survive.

Imagine if instead of two large knives, Hribal had been packing a bolt-action rifle like his brother-in-arms, Adam Lanza, who killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut? Or how about if Hribal’s weapons of choice were semi-automatic handguns, like Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 and injured 17 in his rampage on the Virginia Tech University campus a few years back?

Just imagine if Hribal were toting a semi-automatic. The injuries would have been much worse than what he perpetrated with two knifes. There most assuredly would have been several if not many deaths. And the attack would have lasted much longer, because  the teacher who tackled Hribal would not have been able to do it—he would have been shot—maybe dead—before he got close enough to touch the maniac.

As tragic as the knife attack was, I’m fairly sure that the parents of at least some of the victims are muttering quietly to themselves how relieved they are that the nut didn’t have a gun. 

Those who say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” only have it half right:  guns don’t kill people, people with guns kill people, which is why society has a right and an obligation to keep guns out of the hands of potential killers. Nothing in the Constitution bans regulation of firearms.

And it’s easy to do: toughen gun control laws so that it’s harder for mentally ill or unstable people to get them. Make sure that all gun sales have a three-day wait for a background check on the purchaser that includes going through the national registry, including all sales at guns shows. Ban all Internet gun sales. Beef up the national and state gun registries. Absolutely forbid concealed or unconcealed guns in schools, on university campuses, at airports and in restaurants. Limit the number of guns and amount of bullets someone can buy at one time. Limit the number of guns anyone can own.

Unfortunately state legislators haven’t learned yet that their job is to serve the people, and not to line their campaign coffers with contributions from the National Rifle Association. State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year Since Newtown

About 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced since the Newtown massacre.
178 passed at least one chamber of a state legislature. 109 have become law.

State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year Since Newtown

About 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced since the Newtown massacre.
178 passed at least one chamber of a state legislature. 109 have become law.

State Gun Laws Enacted in the Year Since Newtown

About 1,500 state gun bills have been introduced since the Newtown massacre.
178 passed at least one chamber of a state legislature. 109 have become law.

In the first year after the Newtown shootings, states passed 70 laws loosening gun controls, compared to a mere 39 tightening restrictions on gun purchase and ownership. Nothing demonstrates the power of crony capitalism than the disgraceful way that states across the country are putting their citizens in harm’s way by making it easier to buy guns and carry them in the streets.

I figure that if we strengthened our gun control laws so that they match other westernized countries, we would end up with more knife fights and knife attacks. And that’s a good thing. We can’t totally eliminate the crazies, the angry and the haters. But we can minimize the possibility of them getting hold of weapons that can cause serious damage to multiple people in seconds.

Head of Columbia business school wants to flood labor market to suppress wages

By Marc Jampole

From the solutions he offers to the labor challenges facing the U.S. economy in his article titled “Where Have All the Workers Give,” Glenn Hubbard must think that the problem is a lack of workers, not a lack of jobs.

Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School, economic advisor to Mitt Romney and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under Bush II, is merely expressing the deepest fears of the business establishment: that when the Baby Boom generation retires, a shortage of labor will drive up wages as fewer people compete for a similar number of jobs. 

Now to most people, the problem with the economy is that it is not producing enough jobs. The unemployment rate is still 6.7% and even Hubbard admits that large numbers of the long-termed unemployed have stopped looking for jobs. Plus there are all those underemployed, the hordes of twenty-something baristas and call center operators with college diplomas.  Now common sense would suggest that we need more jobs, but Hubbard believes the real challenges is to get those long term unemployed back looking for jobs—and driving down wages even more than the nose dive in buying power that most people’s compensation took over the past 30 years.

The article, which leads the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday “Review” section, bemoans all government efforts to stimulate the creation of more jobs except one: lowering corporate taxes.  Studies have of course long ago disproven the idea that lowering taxes gives job creators the funds to create more jobs, and that in fact raising taxes creates more jobs. But Hubbard prefers to live in a world of false notions passing as ideas, not one of facts. Or maybe the world of sound bites he mouths on his Fox News TV appearances.

While ignoring job creation, the good professor describes a complete program for creating more job-seekers:

·         Remove the so-called disincentives to work created by the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.

·         Make it harder to qualify for Social Security disability benefits, since without benefits, the disabled will have more incentive to seek employment.

·         Turn much of unemployment insurance into job training—in other words, take the money that those on unemployment insurance were going to use on food and rent and give it to community colleges and for-profit vocational schools for tuition. Keep in mind that a relatively small percent of employers are having trouble finding people with the skills their businesses need—maybe 15-20% of all unfilled jobs. 

·         Eliminate taxes on those receiving Social Security and still working, so that seniors who rejoin the work force will be able to keep more of what they make, supposedly an incentive for the old warriors to strap on their gear again and earn a paycheck.

Of course, those seniors won’t be making that much, and certainly much less than now if Hubbard’s proposals became law.  Hubbard wants to force feed more workers onto the job market, but he proposes nothing to create more jobs.

Like most mainstream Republicans, Hubbard’s underlying interest in advocating these positions is to suppress the cost of wages, which in effect takes money from the poor and middle class and gives it to the owners and operators of businesses AKA the wealthy.  He is trying to undermine the first decent break that Generation X and the Millennials are getting from the 21st century economy—a shrinking work force.

Hubbard’s essay boils down to a declaration of class warfare—or should I say, to a strategic plan for the next phase in the 30+-year war of the wealthy on everyone else in the United States.

If it were up to mainstream news media, there would be no fall election & we would just hand Senate to Republicans

By Marc Jampole

Each new day seems to bring another story predicting Democratic disaster in the November election. One day it’s statistician Nate Silver predicting gloom for the Democrats. The next day it’s an obscure pundit like David Wasserman or Pew Center director Andrew Kahut.

All the overarching story lines by which media outlets try to make sense of everyday news seem to have a built in bias favoring the Republicans.  One narrative is about discontent with Obama over the healthcare law, instead of discontent with the Republicans for cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits and blocking passage of a bill to increase the minimum wage.  Another narrative is about the large sums of money the Koch brothers and others are spending to elect Republican candidates, and not about the large natural advantage Democrats have if their constituencies come to the polls.

Finally there is the story of the primaries, which, as in 2010, is all about the Republican candidates for the mainstream news media and nothing about the Democratic candidates.  Stirring up interest in the Republican primaries will no doubt help bring out the party faithful in November.

These narrative spins wouldn’t disturb me if I thought the Democrats were taking the 2014 elections seriously, but so far there are few signs that they are. The President is content to sit on his treasure trove of campaign contributions. In too many states, Democrats are me-too-ing Republicans on such issues as charter schools, gun control, health care reform and taxes. For example, many of the positions taken by Governor Andrew Cuomo are embarrassingly right-wing. I can understand why many Democrats in New York might stay home rather than vote for a man who wants to lower taxes on businesses and give additional funding to charter schools, which are nothing more than vehicles for breaking unions and paying teaches less.  But Democrats staying home will make it easier for Republicans to tighten their grip on the U.S. House of Representatives and win the Senate. With candidates such as Cuomo, the Democrats seem doomed to repeat the mistake of 2010.

Republicans are not taking any chances, however, passing laws in whatever states they control to make it harder to vote.  But progressives take heart. Republicans can’t prevent eligible voters from exercising their voting franchise, all they can do is demand identification and limit voting hours.

It’s too early in the year to start to stress the importance of voting to millennial and minorities. By the time September and October rolls around, the atmospherics could be better for Democrats. Certainly as more people benefit from the Affordable Care Act, anger against the President, whose name is tied to the bill, will diminish.  Perhaps, as in 2012, voters will respond negatively to moves to suppress the vote and overwhelm the polls.

If I were the Democrats, I would create a one-page set of messages on the bad that will come out of Republican control of both houses of Congress and start repeating it in ads starting sometime in August. I would also conduct as aggressive a voter registration and turnout campaign as possible. I would treat the 2014 election as if it were more important than 2016, and for one simple reason:  it is a more important election. Emerging national demographics favor the Democrats in national elections and they will likely win in 2016, no matter what. But it will be for naught if the new Democratic President faces a hostile Congress.

Of course, if the Democrats run a Republican in all but name such as Andrew Cuomo, it won’t make any difference to the country who wins. We’ll continue down the path of economic decline and social disintegration created by policies that take money from the poor and middle class and give it to those who already are wealthy.