Netanyahu uses faulty logic to justify a dangerous & unwise policy

By Marc Jampole

Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s reasoning makes as little sense as his overall strategy.

Netanyahu is determined to scuttle the imminent deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries over Iran’s development of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. (BTW, P5+1 refers to the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—the United States, Russia, China, United Kingdom and France—plus Germany.) Netanyahu argues that by signing a 10-year deal, the United States and the other countries are giving Iran de facto permission to construct nuclear weapons when the agreement ends. Netanyahu is convinced that once Iran has a nuclear capability, the first thing it will do is use it on Israel.

There are three major holes in Bibi’s logic:

1. From what we can tell, the agreement will likely halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for 10 years, postponing for a generation the possibility of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel.
2. If, after the agreement ends, Iran begins an active program of nuclear weapons development, the United States and other nations can always renew the severe economic sanctions that have been crippling Iran for years.
3. Tehran is less than 1,000 miles from Tel Aviv, close enough that any nuclear bomb exploded in Israel would poison the Iranian air and water for decades. Moreover, Israel would likely respond to a nuclear attack from Iran in a like manner, leading to the immediate deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Iranians. The doctrine of mutually-assured destruction that has kept the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia) safe from a nuclear conflagration would likely also prevent Iran from attempting a first strike against Israel.

But as illogical as Netanyahu is thinking, his overall strategy is even more absurd. How will giving a speech in front of the U.S. Congress sink the talks? Most observers note that the speech represents a marriage of convenience between Republicans, who want to embarrass President Obama, and the Israeli Prime Minister, who thinks the speech will win him votes in the upcoming Israeli elections. In the short term, this strategy is risky, and in the long term it is doomed to failure. His planned speech gives the growing number of American Jews uncomfortable with Israel’s actions vis-à-vis the Palestinians another reason to unite, funnel money to Israeli progressives and jawbone their elected officials. It pisses off many in the United States, already uncomfortable with Netanyahu’s support of additional West Bank settlements. And it worsens his relationship with the head of the country that protects Israel and shtups it with $3.1 billion in military aid every year.

President Obama and others have objected to Netanyahu’s speech before Congress because it comes too close to the Israeli elections and therefore goes against the American tradition of not appearing to interfere in foreign elections. In breaking this tradition, with whom has Netanyahu gone to bed? The American right, which before Reagan had a long history of overt anti-Semitism and still has its share of racists and Jew-haters.

Joining with Republicans to embarrass a Democratic president really has to make a lot of Jewish Senators and Representatives who are Democrats pretty unhappy; even the most militaristic of them may now listen a little more carefully to the arguments of those who want to apply more pressure on Israel to stop building more settlements in the West Bank and finally negotiate a two-state solution. Of course Netanyahu’s insult to the president must please all those Jewish Republicans in Congress—oops, there’s only one!

We haven’t come to the big strategic question—how could Israel possibly be against rapprochement with Iran? What could Israel possibly lose by bringing Iran back into the stable of nations dedicated to peace? Who benefits from the current state of affairs in the Middle East? Of course the Israeli and Jewish equivalents of Islamic and Christian extremists get to keep the status quo, which is helpful to their side. And Israeli and American arms manufacturers certainly benefit from continued tensions, as they will be able to sell more guns, bullets, tanks and aircraft. The status quo suits these groups and their political factotum Netanyahu just fine.

Thus the only way to understand Netanyahu’s campaign to upset the negotiations with Iran as reasoned action is to conclude the he is an ardent supporter of the current instability in the Middle East. And that makes him a warmonger. We can only hope that Israeli voters realize Netanyahu’s way leads to more bloodshed and vote him out of office on March 17.

We need to initiate a massive campaign to make LAWS against the law

By Marc Jampole

Does your spell check program ever frustrate you when it changes the grammatically correct “the person who” to the incorrect “the person that” or misses your mistake when you write the incorrect “the company and their employees” instead of the correct “the company and its employees?”

We can blame these mistakes on the humans who programmed the software.

But who will we blame when computerized robots decide to bomb a village of innocent civilians while searching for an escaped soldier? Or when an autonomous weapon decides on its own to start shooting wildly into a shopping mall?

I’m not talking about drones, which humans operate at a distance. Humans maintain full control over drones.

No, I’m referring to the next advance in weapons of mass destruction: automated weapons that make the decision to shoot, to bomb or to torch without human intervention, based upon the weapon’s completely independent analysis of the situation. They’re called Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) and military contractors all over the world are working furiously to develop them. The United States, Britain, Israel and South Korea already use technologies seen as precursors to fully autonomous weapons systems, according to a New York Times reportthat’s almost two years old. 

You probably haven’t heard much about LAWS. My Google News search revealed a total of 159 stories about them on the same day that close to eight millions stories appeared about the aftermath of Rudy Giuliani’s absurd accusation that President Barack Obama doesn’t love the United States and almost 4.5 million stories covered the death of a minor actor named Ben Woolf (who?). 

Use of LAWS raises many technical issues. Opponents of LAWS wonder if we can ever program a robot to make the subtle distinctions between an enemy combatant and an innocent civilian, or to understand that the enemy has moved its antiaircraft radar device to the roof of a hospital (an exampleI borrow from the Times Bill Keller)? Then there is the issue of faulty programming that plagues automated systems meant to check spelling and grammar, analyze loan applications, translate from one language to another, evaluate essays or select products for purchase. And what happens if an electrical surge or scratch in a printed circuit makes an autonomous weapon go haywire? Or if some rogue programmer implants malware into the system?

The moral issues raised by having robots make battle field decisions for humans are even more troubling. Virtually all systems of human morality start with the principle, “Thou Shall Not Kill.” Since the beginning of recorded history thousands of philosophers, historians, soldiers, politicians and creative writers have written many millions of words pondering when killing another human being is justifiable.  We honor those who kill in society’s name and punish those whose murderous deeds society considers as unwarranted.  The issue of the “just war” is one of the most important themes in moral philosophy since at least the fourth century before the Common Era.

From the birth of humans until today, every killing in peacetime and war, condoned and unsanctioned, single deaths and mass murders—all of it has been committed by individual human beings to whom we can assign praise or blame, guilt or innocence. Taking the decision to pull the trigger, drop the bomb or throw the grenade out of the hands of human beings and putting into the hands of software is inherently immoral because it makes it impossible to determine who really is responsible for a wartime atrocity. The generals will blame the robot or hide behind the robot for justification, claiming that the software is infallible.

Some proponents of LAWS argue that automation will lead to more humane wars, since robots are not subject to mistakes in analysis, vengefulness, panic, fear or other emotions that color the decisions made by men and women in battle. That’s my definition of a sick joke—something that is both funny and horrifying at the same time. The lack of emotion in a robot may cause it to decide to level the village for strategic reasons, whereas a human being might recognize that the deaths of innocents or destruction of historic structures would make an attack unthinkable. And consider how much easier it will be to go to war if all a government had to do was send out the robots. The history of recent American wars suggest two dynamics: 1) the more our soldiers die in a war, the more likely people are to turn against the war; and 2) the number of deaths on the other side doesn’t sway most of the population from supporting a war. It seems clear that having an army of autonomous robots that hold within their operating systems the final decision to shoot or not will lead to more and more violent wars. Holding computers up as more virtuous than humans because they analyze dispassionately is the same kind of illogical thought process as the standard rightwing argument that businesses can regulate themselves but that society must carefully watch food stamp and Medicaid recipients for fraud.

Building the atom bomb was a bad idea that many of the scientists involved later regretted. Building lethal autonomous weapons systems is another bad idea.

I’m advising all OpEdge readers to write, phone or email their Congressional representatives, Senators and the President of the United States every three to four months asking them to come out in favor of banning all LAWS research and development in the United States and to work for a global treaty to ban LAWS R&D internationally. The United States should impose the same harsh sanctions on nations developing LAWS that we now impose on the Soviet Union, Iran and North Korea. We should refuse to buy any military armament from any private company ding LAWS R&D.

There’s a meeting of the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) dedicated to the issue of autonomous weapons on April 13-17. I recommend that all readers email CCW at ccw@unog.ch and tell the organization that it should come out against any further development of LAWS and recommend sanctions against nations and businesses that develop LAWS.

In short we have to make LAWS against the law. Let’s not let this genie get further out of the bottle.

What did Scott Walker miss by quitting college before he earned a degree?

By Marc Jampole

I have no problem with the fact that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker didn’t finish college. Having a college diploma is not an absolute requirement for serving as assemblyperson, county executive, governor or even president.

Of course our only president without a college degree since the 19th century had a pretty shabby record: He helped to start the cold war. He selected nuclear power over solar as the primary energy source for the government to support. He nationalized steel plants to stop a strike. He let demagogue Joe McCarthy walk all over the country and tacitly approved the red scare. His name was Harry Truman and he also approved the two most barbaric single acts in human history: dropping atomic bombs on two Japanese cities after Japan had started negotiating its surrender, thereby killing from 150,000 to 200,000 innocent civilians in two fell swoops.

Just because most elected office holders have college degrees doesn’t mean one has to have one to succeed, just as the fact that the overwhelming number of business executives have diplomas doesn’t mean that we can’t see the occasional Bill Gates, Michael Dell or Mark Zuckerberg. That virtually all of these non-degree-bearing business titans (Steve Jobs was the very rare exception) came from wealthy families probably matters the same as the fact that many if not all of our past presidents without degrees came from wealthy families. Of course, some might say that Walker, even if born to a solidly middle class background, has been recently adopted by the ultra-wealthy Koch family.

Thus, while I would advise a young person who wants to go into politics to get a degree or acquire a wealthy family, I am not opposed to Scott Walker merely because he dropped out of college when he still had between one and two years worth of credits left to earn a degree.

I do, however, wonder what courses Walker missed by leaving Marquette University early?

He obviously missed some economics classes. He buys into the Reagan program of lowering taxes on the wealthy, cutting basic government services, killing unions and reducing regulations—all the policies that have led to the greatest non-violent transfer of wealth in world history over the past 35 years, taking wealth and income from the poor and middle class and giving it to the wealthy. Study after study disputes the economic premises of the rightwing, and yet they persist in proposing lowering taxes, cutting money for public education, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure of mass transit, roads and bridges, passing laws that discourage unionization and opposing regulations that protect our environment and create jobs in new earth-friendly technologies. We could cynically conclude that these right-wingers are supporting a program that helps their major constituency, the ultra-wealthy, but in Walker’s case, might it be that he missed the econ classes that would help him through some of the more arduous number-crunching of mainstream (read: Keynesian) economics?

Walker probably missed some science courses, too. He has signaled many times that he doesn’t believe in human-caused global warming. He promised not to support any legislation that would raise taxes to combat climate change, and has spoken at the climate-denying Heartland Institute. He is also on record as disliking resource recycling.  No one knows Walker’s views on evolution, because he keeps dodging the question. But his comment “Both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God,” seems to suggest that he really doesn’t understand science, since science neither proves nor disproves the existence of a deity. Science investigates how things work, not why they do. Walker’s current attempt to turn the University of Wisconsin, one of the world’s leading research institutions, into a glorified trade school certainly shows a lack of understanding of the importance of new scientific discoveries for the continued well-being and improvement of society.

Another class Walker probably didn’t have a chance to take—or maybe he just didn’t attend the lectures—is Ethics. His reign as Milwaukee County Executive was as full of scandals involving his friends and cronies as has been the political career of Republican Governor Chris Christie, and that’s not a good thing. Walker has been investigated for illegally coordinating contributions from a super PAC. His latest illegal and unethical shenanigan has been to refuse to pay the annual Wisconsin state contribution to state pension programs, another Christie trick. Finally, one has to question the ethics of any candidate who takes millions of dollars from the Koch money machine, since the Kochs are known for injecting false notions into our national discussions about the environment, global warming, taxes and industrial policy.

My question, then, is whether Scott Walker would hold and promote so many false ideas if he had finished college. Judging from the large numbers of diploma-holding Republicans who say they share his beliefs, the answer is probably no. If we want to look for the reason Walker proclaims such ignorant views, we would probably be on firmer ground just following the money—right to the front doors of the Kochs, Adelson, Anschutz, Waltons, Scaifes and other American oligarchs who seek to distort our political discourse by flooding the marketplace of ideas with lies.

Our latest irrelevant distraction: Whose fault if Congress doesn’t fund Homeland Security?

By Marc Jampole

If and when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) loses its funding, will we, the American people, blame the Republicans as we usually do when the federal government or parts of it shut down because of a funding stand-off?

Or will we blame Senate Democrats for not passing the House-approved DHS bill, which contains measures to roll back President Obama’s executive orders regarding immigration?

Will we blame the GOP for trying to link Homeland Security money to keeping the immigration status quo?

Or will we blame the President for announcing new immigration regulations which committed the cardinal capitalist sin of helping average people and not corporations? Or maybe blame him just because he’s Obama and we like to blame our nation’s first Black president whenever possible?

These questions are roiling around the capital as the clock inexorably ticks down towards another imminent deadline for shuttering—at least temporarily—part of the federal government.

You have to hand it to Speaker of the House John Boehner for his ability to breathe new life into the increasingly tiresome shutdown Passion Play that our elected officials have performed these past four years in repertory with that theatre of the absurd that is the House’s Sisyphisian effort to roll back the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act. It is sheer brilliance to construct a potential government shutdown that right-wingers are also 100% against.

In fact everyone seems to be against closing DHS. No one is arguing over the contents of the Homeland Security Bill. The tug-of-war between House Republicans and the Senate has been a tight-bristled broom that has swept away any discussion of DHS’s excessive bureaucracy, waste and lack of transparency. There has been no broader discussion of the DHS role in curtailing civil rights, militarizing local police and creating a surveillance state.

Ironically, DHS is probably the federal department that can weather a funding crisis the best. Many of its parts such as the Border Patrol, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration will continue to operate because they provide “essential services.” Much of the rest of the department such as the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will be able to continue operating because they receive at least partial funding through the fees they charge.

In other words, it’s a classic sideshow that our elected politicians and the mainstream news media use to keep our minds off what really matters. Instead of debating issues of civil liberties, security abuses and crony capitalism on the one hand and real immigration reform on the other, we can enjoy a pissing match between two sides that both pretty much like the DHS just fine the way it is. The blame game between political celebrities has once again replaced a rational discussion of the issues.

Editorial: Derail Trans-Pacific Pact

Democratic members of Congress need to stiffen their spines and, when it comes to vote on fast-tracking consideration of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they must say no to President Obama. Principled conservative Republicans also ought to reject the threats to national sovereignty that the trade pact represents.

The TPP has been negotiated behind closed doors for more than six years, but Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has said he wants to reintroduce a bill granting Fast Track Authority in February to grease the skids for the trade deal.

Fast Track Trade Authority was created in 1974 by President Richard Nixon to minimize public debate and congressional oversight on trade deals. It has been used 16 times since then, often to enact controversial trade pacts, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement and establishment of the World Trade Organization. Those deals made it easier to move manufacturing jobs out of the United States and they also lowered trade barriers to let foreign manufacturers export their goods into the United States, Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch noted.

Fast Track allows the executive branch to unilaterally select partner countries for “trade” pacts, negotiate their contents and sign the agreements and then submit them to Congress, where both the House and Senate are required to vote the agreement up or down, without amendments, within 90 days.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership dates back to 2002, when Chile, New Zealand and Singapore started talking about trade liberalization. More nations joined the talks, including the US in September 2008, during George W. Bush’s administration. Participant nations hoped to wrap up the pact in 2012, but contentious issues such as agriculture, intellectual property, and services and investments dragged out the negotiations. As of 2014, 12 countries in the Asia-Pacific region participated in negotiations, including Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US and Vietnam. China and South Korea reportedly are considering joining TPP.

Global Trade Watch noted that the TPP would expand the NAFTA model that has spurred massive US trade deficits and job loss, downward pressure on wages, unprecedented levels of inequality and new floods of agricultural imports. TPP expands NAFTA’s protections for firms that offshore US jobs. And US negotiators used the 2011 Korea trade deal – under which exports have fallen and trade deficits have surged – as a template for the TPP.

Although it is called a “free trade” agreement, the TPP is not just about trade. Of TPP’s 29 draft chapters, only five deal with traditional trade issues. One chapter would provide incentives to offshore jobs to low-wage countries. Many would impose limits on government policies that we rely on to maintain safe food, a clean environment and more. Our domestic federal, state and local policies would be required to conform with TPP rules.

Radio talker Thom Hartmann prefers to call TPP the “Southern Hemisphere Asian Free Trade Agreement” (SHAFTA).

According to leaked documents, TPP would extend patent protections for drugs made by Big Pharma to prevent rival companies from making generic version of those same drugs, Hartmann noted in a recent commentary. “This a huge deal,” he said.

“If the TPP goes through, real live breathing people (Doctors Without Borders estimates about half a billion of them) will effectively lose affordable access to the medicine they need to survive.”
The TPP also would let corporations sue countries in international courts run by corporations, with judges handpicked from corporate law firms, Hartmann noted. “In other words, if a corporation doesn’t like a regulation, or thinks it’ll diminish their profits, they can sue your town, state, or our federal government over it — and that would gut environmental and financial rules without any input from ‘We the People’ or our elected representatives in Congress.”

Considering what’s at stake, Hartmann noted, you’d think it would be widely covered by the news media. But Media Matters for America recently reported that during the 17 month period between August 2013 and February 2015, only one nightly network news show, PBS’ Newshour, mentioned the trade deal — and they only mentioned it eight times. ABC, CBS, and NBC didn’t mention the TPP once.

Cable news stations did little better when it comes to TPP coverage than their network counterparts. According to Media Matters, Fox “News” and CNN each talked about the trade deal once and MSNBC talked about it 71 times. But those 71 mentions were mostly on one show, The Ed Show, and because MSNBC is only available by cable subscription, most Americans never watched Ed Schultz talk about the TPP.

So you can’t depend on finding the truth about TPP or other issues in which the owners of broadcast media have a financial interest, and daily newspaper editorial pages are largely unwilling or unable to buck the corporate line, either.

You should contact your congressional representative and your senators to urge them to vote against giving President Obama Fast Track Trade Authority. If the bill is worth passing, it ought to be able to survive consideration in the regular order of business, starting with committee hearings and amendments if necessary.

If your representative is a Republican, and particularly if he or she aligns with the Tea Party, you can say that their claims of being a conservative intent on preserving American sovereignty will ring hollow if they vote to give President Obama — the supposed socialist tyrant — a clear route to gain approval of the trade deal that his administration negotiated.

You can call members of the House and Senate either at their local offices or by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.

Good News at the FCC

Considering the neglect of reporting on the TPP and the overall lack of scrutiny by the corporate-owned media on corporate power and the growing oligarchy that is strangling democracy, it is all the more important that President Obama’s Federal Communications Commission appears to be heeding the wishes of millions of grassroots activists to declare that broadband Internet service providers are a public utility.

Obama may have disappointed progressives with his promotion of a trade deal that hands multinational corporations more power, but he encouraged progressives last Nov. 10 when he embraced the principles of “Net Neutrality.” And progressives were elated when Obama’s FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, a former lobbyist for telecoms, announced on Feb. 4 that he will base new “Net Neutrality” rules on Title II of the Communications Act, which will regulate broadband Internet service providers as a public utility, as telephones are regulated. Those new rules are expected to ban ISPs from throttling, blocking and prioritizing their customers’ messages based on their pay plan.

“If the FCC ignores the industry pressure and approves Wheeler’s rules, activists who have fought for a decade to keep the Internet open will have plenty to celebrate,” Matt Wood and Candace Clement of Free Press wrote in a Feb. 11 column on “Net Neutrality’s Biggest Deal Ever.”

If you are reading this newspaper, God bless you, and we’ll keep it coming, but you probably know that you are among a dwindling population of newsprint readers.

The younger generation — and by that we mean people under 40 — increasingly depend on the Internet for their news and information. (Go ahead and buy a youngster a gift subscription anyway!) It is vital to our democracy that corporations aren’t allowed to serve as a gatekeeper for liberal and progressive websites, podcasts and liberal talkers like Hartmann, Amy Goodman, Jim Hightower and others whose programs are available over the Internet. Obama and the Democratic majority on the FCC are taking a major step forward to preserve free speech on the Internet. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2015

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Selections from the March 1, 2015 issue

COVER/Heather Digby Parton
GOP health plan: ‘People could die, that’s OK’

EDITORIAL
Derail Trans-Pacific Pact; Good news at FCC

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

DON ROLLINS
Constitutional elitism

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
One person’s weed is another’s salad

DISPATCHES
Resistance to Medicaid expansion claims Baton Rouge ER;
Kochs back attack on Medicaid;
Employed white Southerners most at risk in O’care challenge;
GOP health plan — same old same old;
Who would trust Repubs with economy again?;
Half of America is still broke;
Obama readies veto pen;
Stein mulls another Green prez race;
Pols start lining up for 2016;
Kochs already have raised $249M for political takeover;
Rauner attacks Illinois unions;
Oil workers strike expands:
Tennessee welfare drug tests find 37 users ...

BOB BURNETT
Republicans try to bully US into attacking Iran

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
A recovery for some

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
A Valentine’s Day gift of health

SAM URETSKY
Vaccine myths still persist

WAYNE O’LEARY
On the road to corporate health care

JOHN BUELL
Alternatives to market myths

NORMAN SOLOMON
CIA mission: Destroy the whistleblower

MARK ANDERSON
Deluded farm groups aid trade trap

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
Black islanders, mainlanders

ROB PATTERSON
Movie houses need to lure us off the couch

JOHN YOUNG
You will not refuse the tar sands mafia

DONALD KAUL
Telling the truth about religious violence

and more ...

Media covers up transgressions by Williams, Cosby & others, until it doesn’t

By Marc Jampole

Today’s New York Times contains four articles on Brian Williams’ propensity to lie about his personal involvement in ongoing news stories such as the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina: two in the business section, one in the science pages and an opinion column by David Brooks. The Times covers multiple aspects of the story: the potential financial impact on NBC, the plunge in Williams’ “trustworthiness” rating, the easy corruption of memory by lies and Brooks’ opinion that Williams should not be forced to resign (BTW, Brooks proffered no such defense for Dan Rather after Rather’s producer forgot to fact-check a forged document in 2004).

The Times represents a microcosm of what’s happening in media land: a full-scale feeding frenzy that includes some 53.6 million stories about Williams’ mendacity identified by Google News. Compare that total to the mere 116,000 stories about the attempt by Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to destroy public sector unions or the just under 6 million stories about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s peevish and counterproductive plans to give a speech about Iran to the U.S. Congress. The Williams lies are attracting more coverage than even Alabama’s almost statewide defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court order to allow people of the same sex to marry in a civil ceremony, which racks up some 43 million stories on Google News. Note dear readers that when you do a Google News search on these topics you may come up with different figures, since the counts are not static.

I note these numbers not to make the point that celebrity news tends to trump real news. Anyone who peruses Internet news portals knows that already. I am merely demonstrating how big the news of Williams’ lies has become—and yet it’s a very old story. Suspicions that the NBC anchor didn’t encounter enemy fire and did not really find a body floating past his 5-star hotel in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina have been around for a long time, but the news media chose not to cover them.

Just like the media determined for years that Bill Cosby’s predilection for drugging and raping women was not of interest to the American public. At the peak of the feeding frenzy a few months back, when it seemed as if every day a different woman was coming forth (heroically, since it stirred up bad memories in each, plus Cosby has a lot of money and clout to discredit the victims), several journalists admitted that they participated in a cover-up of decades-long rumors and accusations against Cosby. The media, perhaps too enamored by this folk hero, collectively refused to follow the story.

Until they did.

The Jerry Sandusky scandal unfolded in a similar way. The only way to describe the media coverage of an aborted investigation of Sandusky for pederasty more than 10 years before the big story broke is “media blackout.”

We know why the news media finally picks up on these scandals. The story becomes too big to ignore or the discussion on social media sites becomes too intense. The big question is why does it take so long for the media to get around to reporting these scandals?

I think we get an inkling of an answer when we contrast the media’s slowness to cover Williams, Cosby and Sandusky with the way it jumped into the fray when it came to accusations against Hillary Clinton—all false—in the Benghazi debacle or accusations—again, false—that John Kerry did not display heroism under fire during the Viet Nam War.

Let’s face it: the mainstream news media operates from a slightly right of center position and looks rightward. It defends those who reflect this point of view, and surely Williams, Cosby and Sandusky all do so in their own right: Williams delivers a right-of-center version of the news. Cosby’s character of Cliff Huxtable represents the American ideal of upper middle class consumerism, and Cosby himself has tended to blame his fellow African-Americans for their lack of social mobility. And what could be more American than Penn State football—except maybe an image of SUVs packed with unneeded purchases tooling home from a mall.

Some will question my examples, since Clinton and Kerry are both political figures, whereas Williams, Cosby and Sandusky are not, but consider these arguments:

The mass media—controlled by the wealthy and ultra-wealthy—tend to look rightward, and are therefore more likely to publish unsubstantiated rumors about left-looking centrists than about conservatives. For example, for years no one published the rumors that Bush I had a love nest; and the media positively buried the incredible amount of evidence that Bush II shirked his National Guard duty. The politician most protected by the mainstream news media today may be New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who is tied to a long series of scandals involving self-dealing and cronyism, and yet is routinely touted as having presidential timber. I predict that a waterfall of reporting of Christie scandals—let’s call it the Christie moment—will begin just as soon as he starts to represent a serious challenge to Jeb Bush, the mainstream media’s choice for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

To current practitioners of mainstream journalism, there is absolutely no difference between an elected official, a news anchor or a football coach. They’re all celebrities and are all treated like celebrities. The media pump up the celebrities they like and tear down those they don’t like. And behind the reasons for liking and not liking are always subtle ideological reasons.

If NBC uses the Dan Rather standard, it’ll force Brian Williams to resign

By Marc Jampole

If NBC follows the Dan Rather standard, it will either force Brian Williams to resign or fire him. Williams is the NBC news anchor who for years has said he rode a helicopter that underwent enemy fire during the ill-fated and disastrous Iraqi war. He has made the claim so many times that no apology or explanation can leave his reputation unstained.

Rather, most will remember, was the long-time CBS anchor who lost his job (excuse me—retired early!) because one of his producers failed to confirm a source. At the time Rather was the most well-known and well-respected television anchor in America. He fronted a report prepared by experienced and well-respected TV news producer Mary Mapes in a show called “60 Minutes Wednesday.” The topic: some memos purported to be written by a Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian that proved once and for all that Bush II shirked his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War era.

Too bad the memos were forgeries. After defending Rather and Mapes for about two weeks, CBS admitted that the news team had inadequately investigated the memos. Mapes was fired almost immediately, and Dan Rather, who was set to retire anyway, went more quickly and less elegantly than previously planned.

The contrasts with the Brian Williams case are striking: Rather did not lie, whereas Williams did. Rather’s report was accurate in the whole, which is to say, a lot of evidence points to the conclusion that George Jr. shrugged off his National Guard duties. Williams, by contrast, was trying to pretend that he was a soldier instead of avoiding being one.

Of course, NBC could follow the Fox News standard, which is much looser regarding the factual content of stories and the punishment reporters get for reporting false information, consciously or by accident. Take the Shirley Sherrod scandal, for example.  Now deceased Andrew Breitbart, an RWRBB (right-wing rich-boy blogger), edited a video copy of a speech of Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Federal Department of Agriculture, to make her sound like a “Black racist” and posted it on his website. Fox ran the clip numerous times. We soon learned that the RWRBB doctored the clip. Fox never checked the accuracy; it probably could have easily seen the edits that Breitbart made to twist Sherrod’s words. But no one was fired at Fox. Not the anchor, not the producer, not a research assistant who might be responsible for fact-checking or sourcing video. Now why is that? Is it because journalistic ethics have declined in the decade since the Rather firing or because Fox doesn’t really care about the accuracy of its stories?

We should give NBC time to assimilate and process the Williams admission of a long-time lie and the public’s reaction to it. But at the end, if it keeps Williams, it puts itself in the same league as Fox News.

Mainstream national news stations distort the political scene in many ways: they select the experts and the issues from a narrow political spectrum that is centrist looking rightward; reduce everything to personalities; truncate coverage of real news in favor of following celebrities; accept the Republican’s definition of the issues; argue by anecdote instead of presenting the facts; stud their stories with hidden messages supporting consumerism and belittling intellectual achievement; and give the wrong side of long-settled issues like vaccination and global warming equal opportunity to spread their ignorance.

But the national mainstream news media rarely tell an out-and-out lie that they know is a lie. Fox does, which makes the NBC decision to fire or not to fire Brian Williams so interesting to observe.

“Liberal” cultural psychologist foregoes science to accept the premises of the right wing

By Marc Jampole

Several progressive friends of mine were raving about Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, which is about three years old, so I read it. In it, Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, extends a very important theory about morality in humans that is emerging among anthropologists and primatologists. But then he uses false reasoning and what looks like shoddy research to twist the theory into a wild assertion that people inherently respond more enthusiastically to rightwing arguments.

In the first part of The Righteous Mind, Haidt explores the idea that morality is hardwired into humans, a theory that has gained much ground over the past few decades. Haidt combines studies by cultural anthropologists and some primatologists to postulate that there exist five distinct foundations to morality and moral thought inherent in humans, all traceable to primates and other mammals. Haidt expresses each of the five as a dichotomy of good and bad behavior:

• Care/harm
• Fairness/cheating
• Loyalty/betrayal
• Authority/subversion
• Sanctity/degradation

Haidt shows how each of these foundations of morality evolved in response to an adaptive challenge, e.g., care/harm evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for the vulnerable young; sanctity evolved as a response to the need to avoid contaminants in food and elsewhere. This first part of the book extends research conducted by Frans de Waal, Jane Goodall and others that pretty much establishes that primates have morality, which means that morality is hardwired into humans, part of our essential nature.

Unfortunately Haidt uses the second half of The Righteous Mind to explicate a bloated theory that liberals concern themselves with only two of these moral foundations, care and fairness, whereas conservatives are concerned with all five. Haidt sees this so-called difference in moral emphasis as the reason conservative arguments resonate so emotionally with the electorate.

Haidt’s premise is that Republicans speak to all five moral foundations, whereas Democrats since 1960 offer a narrow moral vision, based only on the care and fairness moral foundations. We don’t even have to question his assumption that Democrats serve as stand-ins for liberals to see how Haidt jury-rigs his argument. The premise is false, because it posits that only Republicans talk about loyalty, authority and sanctity. What Haidt is really doing is accepting the Republican’s definition of these terms. Haidt contrasts how the Democrats and Republicans talk about fairness—the Dems focus on equal opportunity while the GOP focuses on the unfairness of taking money from taxpayers and giving it to the poor.

But to construct his argument, Haidt must ignore their differences in the areas of loyalty, authority and sanctity and instead state unequivocally that Democratic candidates don’t care about these moral foundations. It’s really utter nonsense. For example, Democrats often speak of the sanctity of life as the reason to have strong social welfare programs; they evoke “law and order” themes as much as Republicans do (see Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop for the sorry details). Haidt gives no example of Republicans’ so-called appeal to the loyalty foundation. Thus, Haidt uses rightwing definitions of two of the three moral centers Democrats supposedly lack and gives no example of the third.

Haidt never considers the other factors that have led to Republican election success in recent decades: He ignores the greater preponderance of cash that Republicans tend to have at their disposal. He ignores the fact that the mainstream news media—owned as they are by the wealthy—tend to pay more attention to Republican races and define political and economic issues using Republican terms. He displays every sign of not having read the works of C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff or Frances Fox Piven/Richard Cloward on how the ruling elite exercises control over elections and the electorate. He never considers the impact of racism, which makes people consider certain groups less than human and therefore not subject to the moral considerations reserved for those considered legitimately humans. Instead, Haidt reduces all the complexity of politics to the Democrats not appealing to three of five moral foundations, as defined by the semantics that Haidt borrows from the rightwing.

Ostensibly substantiating Haidt’s political theory are surveys he and associates have administered. These surveys supposedly show that those who call themselves liberal care much more about the care and fairness foundations than about the other moral foundations, whereas conservatives care equally about all five. But the surveys are full of ambiguous questions that can derive the same answer from both liberals and conservatives.

For example, the basic moral foundations test asks the question, “When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking?” What follows are a number of factors, each of which the respondent must rate as very important to not very important as a consideration. Here are some of the factors, with brief comments on why these answers could misguide researchers:

• Whether or not someone violated standards of purity and decency: Liberals will think it pure and decent for marriage to sanctify gay relationships, whereas conservatives will understand “purity and decency” as standards that regulate the behavior of individuals.
• Whether or not someone did something to betray his or her group. Whether or not someone showed a lack of loyalty: What’s true betrayal or true loyalty?—to blow the whistle on unethical behavior by group leaders or to protect the group by concealing evidence it did something that transgressed its ideology or ethics.
• Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights: Which right? The right to be served or the right not to engage in business transactions with someone whose race or way of life you disapprove of?
• Whether or not someone’s action showed love for his or her country: Some believe Dick Cheney loves his country most; others would say it’s Edward Snowden.

I could spend another 20 pages analyzing the flaws and logical inconsistencies in Haidt’s absurd claim that liberals care about only two of the five moral foundations he and others have identified in primates. Before his flight of fancy into political theory, however, Haidt does establish that the five major strands of moral thinking are innate to humans, which argues against revealed religion as necessary for morality to exist. Anyone who reads The Righteous Mind should stop after the first eight chapters or be prepared to wade through some of the most manipulative and misleading nonsense written in recent years.

New Yorker & Times writers use verbal selfies to communicate myth that science & math are hard & not fun

By Marc Jampole

The epidemic of verbal selfies used to begin feature articles continues unabated. It seems as if every other feature article begins with something about the writer—personal struggles with the problem under discussion, an anecdote from childhood, a favorite professor’s lecture on the topic years ago, how the topic reminds the writer of another subject, the writer’s enthusiasm in broaching the topic, the means by which the writer travelled to meet someone in the article.

These verbal selfies are often laughable, but none more so than Alex Wilkinson’s first few sentences in “The Pursuit of Beauty” in the New Yorker. In sharing his attitude towards and experience with the subject matter, Wilkinson disqualifies himself from writing the article at the same time revealing he is a dishonorable person not to be trusted. 

The article is about a math professor who solved a math problem open for more than 150 years. To entice us to continue reading, which is the function of the first paragraph of a prose piece, Wilkinson writes:

“I don’t see what difference it can make now to reveal that I passed high-school math only because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations and x’s and y’s. On test days, I sat next to Bob Isner or Bruce Gelfand or Ted Chapman or Donny Chamberlain—smart boys whose handwriting I could read—and divided my attention between his desk and the teacher’s eyes. Having skipped me, the talent for math concentrated extravagantly in one of my nieces…”

The article is about advanced math. To write it will require the writer to understand some fairly complicated ideas, at least conceptually, and to understand them well enough to be able to translate them into journalistic English for the reader. Wilkinson disqualifies himself because he admits that he couldn’t even do simple algebra. What’s more, he admits he cheated to pass his math classes. How do we know he hasn’t fudged some of the facts in the article? How do we know his explanation of the problem the mathematician solved doesn’t smooth over with rhetorical lies those concepts Wilkinson failed to understand?

In short, Wilkinson embarrasses and disqualifies himself within the first three sentences. And an editor approved his copy!

Charles Blow tries but fails to pull the same anti-science crap in his article, “A Future Segregated by Science,” in the New York Times. He starts the article, “Let me say up front: I’m not a science guy.” But then Blow quickly admits he loves science (he just likes the arts more!) and even won a high school science fair with a research project. Blow continues his disquisition about his personal relationship with “science” with a shaggy dog story about an airline losing the winning project, preventing him from competing in an international science fair. All this personal stuff comes before a very good article on the racial and gender gap that currently exists in science and technology (STEM) careers.

At least Blow doesn’t disqualify himself from writing the article, since 1) he admits he’s actually pretty good at science and 2) the article is about analyzing statistics—his area of expertise as a writer—and not about science itself.

It’s rare for Blow to start an article with a personal anecdote, except for when the piece concerned Yale campus police stopping his son, a Yalie, without cause. He’s one of the most legitimately creative and interesting journalists with a regular column in a daily newspaper, one who rarely resorts to cheap, overused rhetorical devices.

Why then did Blow feel compelled to start the article by assuring us he’s “Not a science guy”? The article bemoans the fact that science work has become segregated and that few minorities have science and technology careers. He blames both schools for not producing enough STEM graduates and corporations for not hiring recent Hispanic and Black science graduates at the rate at which they do graduate. Blow ends his article with a call for more gender and racial equality in STEM careers.

Blow doesn’t realize that his beginning—“Let me say up front: I’m not a science guy”—is a small part of the problem. Week after week journalists interject snide asides about science and math: Science and math are hard subjects. They’re not fun. Those who like them are socially maladroit and unathletic. Science careers aren’t glamorous. Add to these articles the extensive coverage given to the truly small number of global warming deniers, those who would deny their children vaccines and opponents to evolution. No wonder so many kids don’t want to pursue science careers!

One weapon in this decades-long media war against science and math is for writers to distance themselves from the subject by saying they find it hard or they don’t like it. Some might say that the writers who express dislike or fear of STEM subjects are trying to establish rapport with their readers, who might not be adept at science or might be intimidated by it. But this hypothetical rapport is firmly based in the ideological premise that science and math are difficult and not enjoyable and thereby merely contributes to the anti-science mythology, which is part of the mass media’s larger anti-intellectualism.

Both the cheating poor student Wilkinson and the honorable good student Blow use this rhetorical device and put it at the very beginning of the article. In Wilkinson’s case, it disqualifies him from even writing the article. In Blow’s case, it merely postpones what turns out to be a fine discussion of a crisis.

The two writers are unified by their employment of the most overused rhetorical device in contemporary non-fiction to make a statement that contributes to the anti-science attitudes pervasive in the mass media. How American: narcissism in pursuit of anti-intellectualism.

Editorial: Whose Good Old Days? / Boehner and Bibi’s Common Foe

When Republicans — particularly teabaggers — say they want to go back to the good old days, you have to question what they mean. After all, the greatest period of prosperity in the United States was the approximately 30 years after World War II, when the federal government offered returning GIs low-cost mortgages to buy a home, low-interest loans to start a business and pay their way through college or trade school.

Union membership peaked at 34.8% of the nation’s wage and salary workforce in the mid-1950s and organized labor helped keep wages and benefits rising with productivity through the mid-1970s.

The economy boomed in part because tax rates remained at 91% for millionaires, encouraging corporate executives to plow their profits back into the company rather than inflate their own salary, most of which would end up in the US Treasury.

The postwar boom created the middle class that was the envy of the rest of the world but the plutocrats couldn’t abide workers getting a measure of security. “Economic royalists,” as Franklin Roosevelt called them, had never accepted the New Deal and after Roosevelt died in 1945 the plutocrats dreamed of rolling society back toward the Gilded Age at the turn of the century, when bosses could throw their weight around without pesky government regulations or income taxes and union organizers were hunted with dogs.

The plutocrats knocked the unions back on their heels in 1947, when Republicans regained control of Congress and, with the assistance of anti-labor southern Democrats, passed the Taft-Hartley Act over Harry Truman’s veto. The law limited labor’s ability to organize and strike, and allowed states to pass “Right to Work” laws that prevent unions from requiring fellow workers to join the union. But unions continued to grow, from 14.8 million members (25% of wage-and-hour workforce) after the war, to 21 million, 23.4% of wage and hour workers, in 1979.

Then Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. His administration stopped enforcing anti-trust laws and encouraged corporate executives to maximize shareholder value and dividends. That led, among other things, to the export of manufacturing jobs overseas while Reagan’s National Labor Relations Board was hostile toward union organizers’ complaints. Also, arguing that lower tax rates would stimulate economic activity, Reagan pushed for the top tax rate to drop from 70% in 1981 to 28% in 1988.

By 2014, unions were down to 14.6 million members. That amounted to 11.1% of wage and salary workers, but only 6.6% of private-sector workers were unionized, compared with 35.7% of public-sector workers.

Reagan also led an assault on higher education. When he got to the White House in 1981, his administration, with support from congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, pushed through a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures that slashed spending on higher education by 25%. Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, called students “tax eaters ... [and] a drain and a drag on the American economy.” Student aid “isn’t a proper obligation of the taxpayer,” he said.

Reagan’s Education Secretary Terrel Bell wrote in his memoir that students needing aid were part of the problem, not very different from other “undeserving” Americans, such as the “welfare queen,” the out-of-work father drawing unemployment insurance, the poor families on Medicaid, the elderly in need of Medicare or even farmers relying on subsidies, Devin Fergus noted in the Washington Post (Sept. 2, 2014).

Those attitudes drifted down to the states, where legislators slashed higher education spending, with much of that money diverted to build prisons and cut taxes. States covered 65% of the costs of college in the 1970s. By 2013, states covered 30% of college costs.

Reagan significantly increased spending, primarily the Department of Defense, and he nearly tripled the national debt from $997 billion in 1981 to $2.85 trillion in 1989.

Reaganomics worked for the plutocrats. Since 1973, productivity has continued to grow strongly, especially after 1995, while the typical worker’s compensation has been relatively stagnant. The top 1% of households secured 59.9% of income gains over the last 30 years, the Economic Policy Institute’s Lawrence Mishel noted, while only 8.6% of income gains went to the bottom 90%.

To get back to the “good old days” will require working-class whites to abandon the plutocrats who are financing the teabagger movement. States need to get back to supporting higher education at a level that working families can afford without going into debt. Congress needs to reject “supply-side” economics and restore the ability of workers to organize unions so they can get fair wages and benefits to match productivity growth — or at least provide an incentive for bosses to pay their workers better to head off unionization. And Congress should restore the marginal tax rates for millionaires back to 50% or more (and do away with the lower tax on capital gains). Tax policy should favor working people instead of capital.

Boehner and Bibi’s Common Foe

Congressional Republican leaders have exposed their treachery in their efforts to undermine President Obama as they bypassed the administration in inviting Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress.

Relations between Obama and Netanyahu have been strained since the first year of Obama’s administration, when the new president pressed Netanyahu to stop authorizing Israeli settlements in the West Bank and enter negotiations with the Palestinian state. When Israel announced it would go ahead with construction of 1,600 new homes in a disputed area of east Jerusalem in March 2010, during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joe Biden, it not only scuttled talks with the Palestinians but it was viewed as a calculated poke at Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Netanyahu supported Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. But when Netanyahu accepted Boehner’s invitation to speak to Congress on March 3, two weeks before what looks like a close election in Israel, an anonymous White House official told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “We thought we’ve seen everything. But Bibi managed to surprise even us. There are things you simply don’t do. He spat in our face publicly and that’s no way to behave. Netanyahu ought to remember that President Obama has a year and a half left to his presidency, and that there will be a price.”

Netanyahu’s move may be backfiring. Josh Marshall noted at TalkingPointsMemo.com (Jan. 25) that former Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren, who was appointed by Netanyahu, has said the speech threatens a rift with the US and should be canceled. And Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D), a steadfast supporter of Israel, gave a statement to Haaretz roundly trashing Netanyahu’s visit — both for the breach of diplomatic protocol and for the substance of what Netanyahu is trying to do: blow up US diplomatic efforts to reach an agreement with Iran. And Chemi Shalev reported in Haaretz that the speech debacle appears to be weakening Democratic support for the bill to put new round of sanctions on Iran — the bill President Obama has promised to veto.

When Iran in November 2013 agreed with six nations, including the US, to freeze portions of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for decreased economic sanctions, Netanyahu denounced it as a “historic mistake.” But other prominent Israelis, including Shaul Mofaz, leader of the centrist Kadima Party, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and Amos Yados, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, voiced some support for the interim agreement.

Netanyahu has been spoiling for a fight with Iran for years, and he has been resisting efforts at reconciliation with the Islamic republic, whose leaders signaled their willingness to cooperate with the US in fighting al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, only to be consigned by George W. Bush to the “Axis of Evil” with Iraq and North Korea.

Next time Bibi needs a UN Security Council veto, he can check with Boehner. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2015

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Selections from the February 15, 2015 issue

COVER/Robert Borosage
Obama gets his swagger back

EDITORIAL
Whose good old days?; Boehner & Bibi

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 

EMILY SCHWARTZ GRECO
Obama tips his hat to FDR

RURAL ROUTES/Margot McMillen
Restaurants should develop consciences

DISPATCHES
Greek voters rebel against austerity;
Indiana relents on health care for working poor;
Supermajorities support progressive policies;
Grayson mulls Senate bid;
Koch allies pledge $889M for 2016 campaigns;
Sanders gets Republicans to agree on universal health care;
India agrees to pursue non-carbon energy;
Dems tire of Benghazi committee's partisan turn;
Record number of false convictions overturned; ... 

JOHN YOUNG
Vision vs. blindness on health coverage

DON ROLLINS
The GOP’s little battle plan

ROGER BYBEE
Martin Luther King Jr. opposed ‘right to work’

HEALTH CARE/Joan Retsinas
Genocide and health

SAM URETSKY
Obama’s legacy thus far

WAYNE O’LEARY
Following the brand

JOHN BUELL
Why market myths survive

GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet
Forfeiting our rights

JASON STANFORD
Adios, Rick Perry

BOOK REVIEW/Seth Sandronsky
No war no more

ROB PATTERSON
Pro-choice entertainment

POPULIST PICKS
Foo Fighters; Ladies Detective; St. Vincent

and more ...

The American approach to helping middle class always seems to help the rich more

By Marc Jampole

When the Obama Administration announced plans to begin taxing future withdrawals from 529 college savings plans, those in favor played up the fact that 70% of all tax savings benefits from 529 plans go to families with more than $200,000 a year in income. The opponents of taking away this tax benefit to pay for other proposed educational reforms quickly pointed out that 70% of all 529 accounts belong to households with income under $150,000. Those opposed to reducing the tax benefit won the battle.

No one was asking why 529 plans are even necessary. The answer to that question is that the cost of going to college has risen precipitously over the past 25 years to the point that, without some assistance, large numbers of families can’t afford to send their children to college. The overwhelmingly most important reason for this rise in the cost of a college education is the withdrawal of federal and state support of higher education, starting in the Reagan years.

It’s a familiar pattern: A benefit meant to help the middle class address a financial challenge ends up helping the wealthy more. Most IRA money is in the accounts of people with the highest incomes. Remember that IRAs first came into existence under Reagan in 1981 as an alternative to traditional defined benefit pensions plans. In this case, it was the private sector retreating from its support of the middle class and poor—who primarily work for others—that led to the new need.

We see a similar pattern with the mortgage deduction. It used to be that all personal interest was deductible, but when Congress limited the interest deduction to home mortgages in 1986, again under Reagan, our leaders said it was to help keep home-owning more affordable. Again, even though affordability is not an issue to the wealthy, they are the ones to have benefited because they have larger mortgages. Politicians and pundits now associate the mortgage deduction with the middle class, but it’s the wealthy who benefit more.

It’s not just that the wealthy can deduct more from income because of these “middle class” deductions. It’s also the case that every dollar a wealthy person deducts is worth more in real money that isn’t taken away in taxes because the wealthy pay at a higher rate. These deductions may also drive other income below the threshold at which a higher taxation rate takes effect, thereby putting even more money in the pockets of the wealthy.

There are only three ways that government can address the lost revenue from a tax deduction:

• Increase the deficit
• Cut programs
• Increase taxes on someone else

For most of the past 35 years, the federal government has preferred to increase the debt and cut programs. The net effect has been one more way of shifting income from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Thus we see time and time again over the past 35 years an institutional propensity to increase inequality of wealth in the United States, similar to the institutional racism that used to exist for decades throughout the country and still exists in the criminal justice system. Take something away from the middle class and poor, then give them a way to finance their new costs that ends up providing even greater benefits to the wealthy, who don’t really need the additional help. It’s a complicated shell game that has made a contribution to the dramatic increase in inequality of wealth and income in the United States over the past 35 years.

You can count on Wall Street Journal to deliver all the bogus facts rightwingers need to create an alternative reality

By Marc Jampole

Conservative think tanks and business associations know that they can always plant a bogus survey or an opinion piece by a bought-and-sold expert in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. That is, as long as the study supports unregulated growth based on fossil fuels and giving the biggest rewards to large corporate and banking interests.

The latest proof that the Journal prints all the news that fits with its rightwing ideology is “Many Millennials Yearn for Suburban Homes,” which touts a shoddy survey by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) claiming to prove that 66% of the Millennial generation wants to live in the suburbs. The study results go counter to the common belief, backed by a myriad of attitudinal studies, that a large number of Millennials prefer city life, in part because they are rejecting private ownership of cars as environmentally incorrect.

This preference for the urban experience is one of the major ways that experts say Millennials differ from their predecessors, Generation X and the Baby Boomers. The Journal article holds up the survey as proof that Millennials really want more room and therefore pine for the car-and-mall-focused suburban life.

But as it turns out, the NAHB survey does nothing more than exemplify that—as either Mark Twain or Samuel Butler once said—“figures never lie, but liars figure.”

The NAHB mendacious use of numbers comes in how it defines the Millennial generation. It takes responses from 1,506 people born since 1977. The main reason to be suspicious that NAHB cooked the books is that it is impossible to find anybody who says the Millennial generation started in 1977. Most citations I found on the Internet identify 1982 as the start year for Millennial births. A Newsweek article of a few years back used 1989 as the start date and Pew Research generally goes with 1981. But virtually everyone else says it’s 1982. My own analysis of a line chart of total births against the average growth rate concludes that we should start counting Millennials in 1984 or 1986. But no expert I could find uses 1977.

The time between 1977 and 1982 is five years, or one quarter of the approximately 20 years that sociologists and demographers tend to view as defining Boomers, Gen X-ers and Millennials. We have no idea how many of the 1,506 surveyed were born before 1982 and therefore should probably not be counted as Millennials.

The other problem with the study is that the NAHB only asked about city versus suburbs to people who had first answered that they had either purchased a home in the last three years or intend to within the next three years. Eliminating everyone else almost by definition front-loads the age of the respondents, which in this case means that most of them were born too early to really be called Millennials. According to U.S. Census figures, for each of the past 25 years many more people aged 35-39 own homes than those aged 30-34; those aged 25-29—the heart of the Millennial generation—are almost half as likely to own a home than the 35-39-year-olds. In others words, adding five years worth of Gen X-ers to the study universe has a dramatic effect on the results, overestimating the desire of Millennials to live in the suburbs. Moreover, rejecting anyone who doesn’t own or plan to own a home in all likelihood skews the universe of respondents even further.

The Journal never addresses the issue of what years constitute Millennial births, but it does finally admit that selecting only those who own or will soon buy a home makes the survey unreliable. But the writer waits until the tenth paragraph to do so, in effect burying the information.

We know why NAHB would construct and distribute such a transparently invalid survey. It’s less expensive to build homes in the suburbs, and that’s where most new homes are built.

But why would the Journal publish such dreck?

The answer is that the survey fits into it’s the Journal ideology in several ways: The Wall Street Journal believes that local economic policy should benefit developers, banks and corporations, and the study certainly shores up those interests.

But just as important, the Journal hates cities and what cities stand for. The Journal is a proponent of private property, private space and private solutions to social problems. The essence of the urban environment is the public space. Major cities need viable public transportation, whereas the Journal worships car culture and hates anything public. Cities thrive on cultural diversity, and the Journal loves the white bread, the middle brow and the middle of the road when it comes to cultural experiences. City voters are much more liberal than suburban voters. In short, cities such as New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Chicago represent everything that The Wall Street Journal and its owner Rupert Murdoch despise.

Paterno case raises a broader issue of praise and blame

By Marc Jampole

“The Rehabilitation of Paterno, Back at No. 1” read the New York Times front page headline when the news hit of the settlement of the lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its sanctions of the Penn State football program because it turned its back while an assistant coach was sexually abusing children. This rehabilitation or vindication of Paterno in the eyes of those who never thought he did anything wrong brings up a broader issue of the praise and rewards we heap on some people.

In Praise and Blame, moral philosopher Daniel Robinson asserts that people get too much praise—and by implication too many rewards—for their accomplishments, which are too often the result of factors beyond the control of the individual. Some of those factors include the innate ability one has at birth and does nothing to get, wealth and social position of family, match of skills to what’s in demand, chance meetings with mentors and patrons and timing.

Applying the principles of Praise and Blame, it’s clear that Paterno always received too much credit for those victories, which resulted from a group effort of his football players, coaches, recruiters, alumni and university staff.

His first luck was to be born with high ability in the types of intelligence that leads to success in football—organization, strategy, communications skills, ability to predict change in complex patterns of motion. Like the basketball player Spencer Haywood, who was born with an extra set of knuckles on his enormous hands, or the physics whiz whose math IQ is so high that it’s virtually immeasurable, Paterno did nothing except be born to have his natural genius.

Paterno was also lucky that a rich guy agreed to pay his tuition to an Ivy League college, a place where he could get connected to a powerful network of contacts.

He was lucky to have a mentor who hired him to be an assistant coach at Penn State, lucky to have an alumni support system that helped to identify players and raise funds for state-of-the-art facilities, lucky that Penn State football is the big sports team for miles around, which it wouldn’t be if the university were located in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh or New York.

That Paterno stayed in the same place that offered him his first real job may have stemmed from a personality trait, not the fact that he kept getting promoted. Lots of successful people flit around. Think of Larry Brown or Urban Meyer. If Paterno’s nature was to stay in one place, how lucky he was that place was Penn State. If his mentor took a job at Bowdoin or Grinnell, would Paterno have remained loyal to his first university job and had a long, but mediocre career?

Paterno was the commanding general and not the field general in the 111 victories returned to Penn State by the NCAA. The field generals were a succession of quarterbacks. Paterno not only taught, selected and advised the players, but he managed the other coaches, the medical staff, the weight trainers, the tutors, the recruiters, the statisticians, the caterers and the liaisons to the alumni and public. All these people—an ever changing cast of characters over decades—contributed to his success. Without them, he would have been nothing.

Let’s still admit that Joe Paterno was a genius football coach of mostly legitimate students. Probably most other people given the same set of breaks would not have done as well as JoePa.

But the luck part of it mitigates the position that every one of us holds in life, be it high, low or somewhere in the middle: what you accomplish should not really be used to judge the essence of any of us because so much of it results from circumstances beyond our control. Joe Paterno is a perfect example of the preponderance of factors beyond our own efforts that determine our lot in life.

What we’re left with then is not money, championships, fame or respect by which to judge a person, but those things which he or she can control. And in 1999, Joe Paterno had absolute control over how he was going to act after hearing from an assistant that Jerry Sandusky molested a young boy in the shower. He was in control when he passed on a cursory report to the administration, and he was in control when he didn’t follow up to see what the administration was doing. He was in control when he didn’t make it an important issue, didn’t insist on getting the results of a real investigation. He was in control when he didn’t ponder the implication of the accusation against Sandusky, what it meant to the children in the programs the monster controlled. He was in control when he swept it under the rug like yesterday’s dust bunnies.

Thus while we can readily hold back the praise of Paterno’s successes, shaped as they were by luck, there is no way we can mitigate the blame he holds for the repeated rapes of young boys for more than 10 years because he failed to speak up aggressively to follow-through on a horrifying accusation.

What took Obama so long to address our unfair tax system? And why is his plan so complicated?

By Marc Jampole

Barack Obama started with majorities in both the House and Senate. Six years later the opposition holds both.

Why did the president wait until he was in the overwhelming minority to push for higher taxes for the wealthy and lower taxes on the middle class?

True, a few years back Democrats and Republicans kind of negotiated an agreement that raised taxes slightly on the top 1%, but it was accompanied with Draconian cuts to federal programs. And it is true that the richer you are, the more you have to pay in taxes related to the Affordable Care Act. But neither of those moves had attached to them the grandiose notion of taking from the wealthy to give to the middle class.

The big picture of Obama’s current proposal sounds great. But the details are not exciting, as Obama prefers to tinker with the tax code instead of just raising marginal tax rates. The New York Times said that Obama proposes eliminating a federal tax provision regarding inherited assets that shields hundreds of billions of dollars from taxation each year. The plan also raises the top capital gains tax rate to 28% for couples with incomes above $500,000 annually and places a new fee on banks with assets over $50 billion.

What the middle class gets is equally as complicated as what the rich pay: tax breaks for middle-income earners; a $500 credit for families in which both spouses work; increased child care and education credits; and incentives to save for retirement.

It’s interesting how many of the tax breaks Obama is proposing for the middle class facilitate and perpetuate the new world economy wrought by Reaganism. It used to be that a family could afford to have only one spouse work, but now two incomes are absolutely necessary to maintain middle class status for tens of millions of families. $500 isn’t much, but it does help to some degree to keep the second spouse in the workforce, thereby keeping a lid on wages that would surely increase if fewer people wanted to work. Incentives for retirement are only necessary because defined benefit pensions are gone and people are on their own, sink or swim, except for Social Security, a program that many Republicans would love to dismantle. The increased education credit also responds to the new world reality of college costs made prohibitive to the middle class and poor because of the steady decline in federal and state support of higher education.

Obama’s noble gesture—calling for some fine-tuning of the system that has led to the greatest inequality of wealth in the United States since the Gilded Age—comes only after his only hope for controlling the direction of the government has become the veto and executive order. It’s so much sound and fury, so much rhetoric meant to paint the Republicans into a corner, meant to draw a contrast between the Republican and Democrats for the 2016 election cycle.

Politics seems to enter into the decisions of all contemporary politicians. But politics aside, Obama’s decision to resume friendly relations with Cuba, his decision to grant papers to about 5 million illegal immigrants and his climate change accord with China all moved the country in the direction it needs to head, even if in the case of the environmental accord, it was only a nudge. The decision to seek support for community colleges takes a realistic approach to giving more poor kids access to higher education.

But calling on Congress to end some tax breaks for the wealthy and give others to the middle class is nothing but grandstanding, given it will never pass. I call it grandstanding because it creates a minimal distance between where he and other Democrats stand and where Republicans stand. This small distance is supposed to make the 99% want to vote Democratic, because the Democrats are going to reverse the 35-year flow of wealth and income up the ladder to the wealthy and ultra-wealthy. But what Obama is calling for isn’t even a start. It’s a quarter turn of a screw.

I would feel differently if Obama were calling for a large increase in the capital gains tax or lifting the cap on income assessed the Social Security tax. Congress wouldn’t go for it, but at least Obama would be making a point.

Instead, he’s trying to further redefine the definition of what it means to be left in this country, moving it further to the right.