Saturday, January 31, 2015

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












Wednesday, January 28, 2015

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.

Friday, January 23, 2015

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.

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

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.

NCAA doesn’t exonerate Joe Paterno, it cuts a business deal to end a lawsuit

By Marc Jampole
Some Penn State football fans are acting as if they won the national championship.
That’s the reaction I read in the quotes I’ve culled from news articles about the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) settlement of the lawsuit filed by Pennsylvania State Senator Jake Corman to overturn the heavy fines the NCAA placed on Penn State University for looking the other way while assistant coach and pervert Jerry Sandusky sexually abused a large number of boys.
Here is a sprinkling of what is being said (names omitted):
  • “Today is a victory for the people of Pennsylvania….The NCAA has surrendered.”
  • “This is significant.…This was a beat down on the NCAA, it really was.”
  • [Mr. Paterno’s reputation has been restored] “to a large degree.”
  • “I’m happy this wrong has been righted.”
  • “Vindication is Penn State’s. Vindication is Joe Paterno’s.  And the bullying NCAA walks away from its worst hour in utter disgrace.”
Except that’s not what happened. No matter what the extreme Penn State fans and sports pundits may want to think, the NCAA did not capitulate. It has not been disgraced It did not suffer a beat down.
What the NCAA did was settle an expensive lawsuit that could have dragged on for years. By settling, the NCAA makes sure that the $60 million it collected as a fine for Penn State’s role in facilitating Sandusky’s crimes goes to fight child abuse victims in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  Otherwise, a lot of the money would have been spent on lawyers. In the news release the NCAA issued about the deal, Harris Pastides, University of South Carolina president and member of the NCAA Board of Governors put it well, “While others will focus on the return of wins, our top priority is on protecting, educating and nurturing young people.” As well it should be.
The NCAA made a business deal that was in the best interest of the organization and society. It did not admit that it made a mistake to vacate victories, nor that it overreached in its punishment.  “Today’s agreement with Penn State reaffirms our authority to act,” said Kirk Schulz, Kansas State University president and member of the NCAA Board of Governors, who also spoke for the organization.  The NCAA news release about the settlement went out of its way to mention that Penn State had cleaned up its act and thus deserved reconsideration. The implication is that the NCAA is still in charge.
The news reporting has focused on the fact that the NCAA gave Joe Paterno back the 111 Penn State victories the NCAA had vacated because they came after Paterno first learned that a key assistant was sexually assaulting young boys.
Also untrue.
The victories were not given back to Joe Paterno, but to Penn State. While the punishment was appropriate at the time, it also took something of real value away from hundreds of Penn State football players, who were innocent victims of the fallout from the mess. The NCAA does not even mention the former coach in its news release, although it does state firmly that it intends to continue its defense of the lawsuit from the Paterno family.
As a negotiating point, to give back those Penn State wins in return for keeping the $60 million looks like a complete victory to me.  If anyone put the beat down on the other side it was the NCAA and its executive committee who can walk tall today (for a change, as its record in administering sports for college students is execrable).
As for those grotesquely strutting peacocks spiking an imaginary football and declaring victory for Penn State and Joe Paterno, I would like to suggest that they conduct a thought experiment. Imagine what it’s like to be a 10-year-old in the process of being sexually violated. Think about the touching, the being touched, the insertion of various body parts, the uneasy feeling, the guilt that young children typically feel because they tend to blame themselves, the nightmares, the fear that it won’t be the last time.
Imagine yourself not as one boy, but as every single one of the many children Sandusky was able to violate over the more than 10 years that went by after Paterno first learned that Sandusky was taking boys in the shower.
No, Joe Paterno’s reputation has not been rehabilitated.  And yes, Penn State still has a lot of dues to pay.

Saturday, January 17, 2015

EDITORIAL Congress Heads for Trouble


In the first week of the 114th Congress, the new Republican overlords acted to undermine the Affordable Care Act; set up a Social Security funding crisis; require President Obama to accept the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; enact new roadblocks to immigration reform; and undermine the Dodd-Frank financial reforms.

Republicans want to bull ahead with the Keystone pipeline regardless of the threat of potentially toxic leaks over the environmentally sensitive Ogallala Aquifer in the Midwest, in pursuit of 42,000 short-term jobs in building the pipeline and less than 50 long-term jobs to maintain it — all to carry Canadian oil to Texas to be refined for export overseas. Of course, the GOP also passed a bill to make it much more difficult to pass and enforce regulations to be enforced by federal and independent agencies.

The House got a quicker start at mischief than the Senate since House leaders don’t pretend to seek consensus. They adopted a rule to create a funding crisis for Social Security Disability Insurance by banning transfer of funds within the Social Security Trust. That wouldn’t be so bad if Congressional Republicans had any intention of fixing the shortfall that is expected in the Social Security Disability program next year, but they have no apparent intention to do so. If Congress does not fix the disability trust fund, it will result in a 20% benefit reduction for 11 million disabled Americans.

“Reallocation has never been controversial, but detractors working to privatize Social Security will do anything to manufacture a crisis out of a routine administrative function,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said. “Rather than solve the short-term problems facing the Social Security Disability program as we have in the past, Republicans want to set the stage to cut benefits for seniors and disabled Americans.”

Republicans adopted another House rule to require that the supposedly nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office use “dynamic scoring” on tax bills, so that tax cuts will result in forecasts of higher tax revenue, in accordance with Republican “supply-side” voodoo economics, regardless of what experience shows.

Wall Street lobbyists have been working overtime to repeal the Dodd-Frank reforms that were adopted in 2010 to regulate Wall Street speculators and prevent a repeat of the Bush Recession. If Republicans can’t do it in one big bill, they’ll try to repeal Dodd-Frank piecemeal in amendments to other bills..

The House also passed the Regulatory Accountability Act, which is ostensibly aimed at cutting costly regulations, but considers the costs to businesses of regulations, not the costs to the public of allowing businesses to pollute the air and water.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that he might be open to resurrecting talks with the White House over a “Grand Bargain” that would include Social Security and Medicare “reforms” and steps to achieve a balanced budget — presumably, by cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Until now, McConnell and Obama have spoken mainly about fast-track trade legislation, some elements of corporate tax reform and a surge in spending for highways, bridges, and other infrastructure. McConnell appeared much more expansive in what he thought could be accomplished, but progressives should be concerned about any “Grand Bargain” that McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner could sign onto. President Obama had better make sure that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the new ranking member of the Budget Committee, are involved in any such negotiations.

Pelosi has endorsed a “Robin Hood” tax plan that would place a 0.1% fee on financial transactions that would be rolled in with reductions in tax breaks for the top 1% of earners. The new taxes would fund a “paycheck bonus credit” of $2,000 a year for couples earning less than $200,000. Sanders’ vision of a “progressive” budget includes ending tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations, reducing defense spending and boosting entitlement programs, such as Social Security, the Veterans Administration and Medicare. He has introduced legislation that would raise the payroll tax cap on people making over $250,000 a year in order to keep Social Security solvent for another 75 years. If Republicans aren’t going to move in that direction, Obama and the Democrats should feel no need to knuckle under.

Make College Affordable Again

President Obama announced a commendable plan to make community college free for students who maintain their grades. The program would be available for students who maintain a 2.5 grade point average and apply to schools that offer occupational training or credit toward a four-year degree.

If President Obama truly wants to transform the cost of higher education, Bryce Covert noted at ThinkProgress.org (Jan. 9), Obama could make college free for all students without having to lay out more money to pay for it. That’s because the federal government could take the $69 billion it currently spends to subsidize the cost of college through grants, tax breaks, and work-study funds and instead cover tuition at all public colleges, which came to $62.6 billion in 2012, the most recent data. (The government spends another $197.4 billion on student loans.) That would give all students who want to get a college degree a free option to do so. It could also put pressure on private universities to compete with the free option by reducing their costs, which have risen 13% over the last five years.

But states also should take more responsibility for lowing the costs to attend their universities. When Rick Perry attended Texas A&M in 1970, tuition and fees cost $208 a year as the state paid 85% of the cost of running the university. Forty years ago, Texas kept college costs low enough that a student from a working-class family could reasonably cover the costs of tuition and fees by working during the summer at minimum wage.

What happened since then? Ronald Reagan led a Republican effort to increase costs for college students. When he was governor of California, Reagan complained that college students had it too easy, since the state’s universities didn’t charge tuition. He ended that populist feature and, after he became president in 1981, Reagan targeted federal assistance for higher education. He cut 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. The Texas Legislature deregulated tuition in 2003 under Gov. Rick Perry. Now the state pays less than 15% of college costs. Texas universities now cost more than $25,000 a year for tuition, fees, room and board. In California, the state pays only 11% of the university budget and it costs undergraduates more than $31,000 annually for tuition, fees, room and board.

States also could reverse the prison-building program that was needed to house the hundreds of thousands of people who were caught possessing and distributing controlled substances, such as marijuana and cocaine, during the War on Drugs.

The number of drug offenders in state prisons nationwide has increased from 19,000 in 1980 to 225,200 today, the Sentencing Project reported. Another 181,700 drug offenders are held in local jails. Most of these people are not high-level actors in the drug trade and no record of violence, the Sentencing Project noted.

Of the roughly 170,000 inmates in Texas prisons, about 90,000 are classified as non-violent, the American Civil Liberties Union noted. But it costs about $20,000 a year to keep an inmate in a Texas prison. Every $20,000 spent to keep a pothead in prison is $20,000 that could be spent sending a budding scholar to college. And if lawmakers don’t want to make that shift in public spending priorities, they should at least increase the minimum wage so that college students can pay for their tuition with summer jobs. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2015
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Selections from the February 1, 2015 issue















And I Saw A Bush Rise Up Out of The Sea …


By CHARLES CULLEN

So the walls are coming down, the plane has finally crashed into the mountain, and Jeb Bush is running for President.

Ignoring the fact that this is very, very bad for Democrats, why not turn to the fascinating questions surrounding the viability of his Presidential campaign?  To examine this question we must assume that Bush will be successful in the Republican primary.  Since I believe his success is relatively likely, given his donors and connections, I believe the question an interesting one.  And certainly one worth asking.  Will we, the populace, really elect a third Bush?  We’re certainly stupid enough to do so (look at Bush II’s second election). 

The looming spectacle of another Bush occupying the West Wing is made even more frightening by the facts that the public likes to switch parties after two terms (probably a healthy instinct, had one of our two major parties not driven right off the sanity-cliff). Bush almost certainly has Florida (root, root, root for the home-team, even if they’re implicated in lots of ethics violations), and he has an ability no Republican challenger has had since Bush I; he seems pretty sane.  Also, he may end up being challenged by a woman.  If that woman is Hillary Clinton, I’m calling it: game, Bush.  The strange national hatred of her has never disappeared.  And she will be blamed—by both sides—for everything they didn’t like about Obama’s tenure. 

We can’t ignore the fact that any woman, be it Warren, Clinton, you name her, would have a herculean task reaching the mountaintop of the presidency.  Obama managed to win despite the disadvantage of not being white, but was assisted in both campaigns.  First, it helped that Bush II was a walking disaster, enjoying his second term.  Second, McCain offered a helping hand by abandoning his politics, going off the rails, and by choosing a living joke as his running mate.  Are you outside your house?  Can you see Russia?

As for Obama’s reelection campaign, I believe that the tape of Romney tossing aside the grubby cloak of the average Joe, and showing us his true colors as a sociopathic plutocrat was very helpful, if not essential.  We must come to terms with the uncomfortable reality that Obama was elected because he is an exceptional politician, a magnificent orator, and much, much smarter than your average bear…and that he had quite a bit of help from the other side.  They were coming off a two term disaster president (of their own party) and simply couldn’t keep up with Obama.  Nor could they stop shooting themselves in the foot, or for that matter old men in the face.  If Obama’s tenure tricks us into thinking that black politicians will be treated pretty much the same as white politicians, then we as a Nation must pull our collective heads out of, well, the dark. 

Politicians like Obama come along rarely and acknowledging that is essential to the Democratic Party.  I suppose what I’m saying is that to vault the gender-gap we’re going to need another exceptional politician, and/or a foaming-at-the-mouth crazy challenger.  I’m talking TMZ catches Presidential hopeful eating live chickens crazy. 

Ever met someone who thinks racism ended with Obama?  Yeah?  Well there are at least twice as many who think either that the gender gap has closed or that women are simply incapable of wielding the awesome power of the Presidency.     

So what do we do?  Do we, as a National Party unwillingly tasked with being the single sane party—the parental figure, if you will—in a two party system, simply take a noble knee and nominate Clinton two show that we’re serious about equality?  Do we run Warren to make the same point and still (maybe) win?  Is Warren, in fact, a more competitive option in the general election?  She certainly isn’t in the primary.  But I think we can all agree that primaries alone do not effective candidates make.

I rarely write articles posing questions to which I simply do not know the answer.  Usually, I at least think I know the answer; know what’s in the last chapter of the book.  Here I do not.  What I do know is that the Democrats have been in power through President Obama for six years going on eight.  I know the populace likes to switch sides after some time, and I know that switching is the difference in states like Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and Wisconsin.  I know that for a woman to be elected to our highest office, we would need a politician of exceptional talent and character, and we would probably also need her Republican challenger to fumble the ball in the grand tradition of Romney and McCain. 

I write this article because these are questions we need to ask ourselves.  Will Jeb get out of the primary?  Will he maintain his sanity throughout the campaign process?  Will we run a woman against him, and if so, who?  I’m not suggesting we shy away from our female candidates because we fear sexism.  I am asking these questions because a Republican Presidency is not simply a set-back, it is a disaster. 

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Contrast in coverage shows how mainstream media trivializes big issues

By Marc Jampole
This week both the New York Times and Nation magazine covered the continued ill will that the New York police department has been directing at New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio since His Honor joined most New Yorkers in questioning police tactics and procedures after the deaths of Akai Gurley and Eric Garner.

The Times article details the missteps that it believes de Blasio has made in his interactions with the police department and police unions. For example, the Times claims that the rank-and-file felt that de Blasio displayed disrespect towards them by embracing the Reverend Al Sharpton, a critic of the police. Then they got pissed when de Blasio hired Sharpton’s former spokesperson as an aide; the cops supposedly didn’t like that her significant other (whom the Times chooses to label as a “live-in boyfriend”) was convicted of murder.

By contrast, Nation takes the long view, recounting the bad blood that the New York police had with past New York mayors going all the way back to Fiorello La Guardia, and including Robert Wagner, John Lindsay, David Dinkins and rightwing idol Rudy Guiliani. The Nation also demonstrates with solid numbers that none of these mayors suffered any vote loss in elections after having public spats with the NYPD rank and file. Nation examines the broader issue of the relationship between the police and the rest of government as a minor dynamic in New York City history

In the Times article, de Blasio comes across as stunned and dismayed by the rift. Nation decides not to characterize the mayor’s current state of mind, instead reminding both the mayor and all of us that New Yorkers appreciate and re-elect strong New York mayors who stick to their principles.

The Times reduces the story to personalities to inflate its significance. Nation places it into the broader context of history to demonstrate its inherent triviality. Both approaches to journalism and history go back a long way. Thucydides used the great man idea—this notion that the actions of a few individuals determines history—when depicting the Peloponnesian War in ancient times, and Victorian Thomas Carlyle proposed it as the explanation of all of history. Karl Marx and the Annales school of historians led by Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and others took a broader look at long-lasting trends and the movement, beliefs and actions of groups more than individuals.

Maybe it’s my leftwing bias, but I’m inclined to side with the Nation on this issue, both in its conclusions and the way it covered the story.

Unfortunately, the Times circulation is more than 1.8 million, approximately 14 times the 125,500 readership of Nation, plus Times articles are routinely published ubiquitously in hard copy and over the Internet, whereas mainstream media aggregators and reprinters assiduously avoid Nation’s articles. Thus many more people will read the Times sensationalized version of the relationship between the mayor and the police than the Nation’s studied analysis.

In a coda to this tale of dueling points of views—the personal versus the historical—Mayor de Blasio has subsequently said that he would veto a City Council law criminalizing the police use of chokeholds. It doesn’t mean that de Blasio is now capitulating to the police to curry their favor. De Blasio’s point is that chokeholds are already against NYPD regulations, so a law is not needed. Instead of seeking to wreak vengeance on a police department that has shown him uncalled-for disrespect, de Blasio is behaving like an adult and expecting the police department to behave in the same way. New York City doesn’t need a law if the department enforces regulations.


The key, of course, is to enforce the regulation and go after any offenders.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Warrior cops continue to destroy civil liberties and the lives of innocent people

By Marc Jampole

 I’ve been suffering a slight case of cognitive dissonance lately, a disorientation that stems from residing in two worlds at once. One world is the TV show “The Wire.” I’ve been streaming and watching all the episodes from beginning to end and just completed the second season. I love the show, which is more about the foibles of institutions than people—definitely one of the four or five best TV series of the past 50 years.

But I only watch the TV screen about two hours a day and during some of my other waking hours, I’m reading Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko. Both “The Wire” and Balko’s book spend a lot of time detailing anecdotes of police raids on homes, but the differences are so stark that it’s sending my head into a deep and befuddling spin.

In “The Wire” and most other urban cop dramas, the drug dealers always have guns and are often ready to shoot. The cops never raid the wrong place, always respect the rights of the drug dealers, shoot to wound when possible and often take a bullet from the bad guys. The weapons the police bring seem appropriate to the dangerous situation, especially when you consider that the drug dealers are always packing major heat. The cops are heroes.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, which traces the gradual militarization of American police departments since the Nixon Administration, the cops seem always to hit the wrong location, often kill or injure innocent people, trample on basic constitutional rights and behave offensively even after they know someone is innocent.

When I think of 20 years worth of “Law and Order” episodes in which prosecutors have gone after bad cops, my cognitive dissonance grows even larger. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, prosecutors always defend the actions of the police, no matter how violently inappropriate they were, and both prosecutors and judges rubber-stamp “no-knock” entries with SWAT teams whenever the police ask for them, no matter how tenuous or incomplete the evidence.

The difference between the TV shows and Balko’s book is that Balko backs up his litany of horrifying anecdotes with statistics that suggest that police departments are out of control—they have too many weapons not appropriate for use in civilian situations, they call in SWAT teams way too often and they injure and kill too many innocent people.

Balko traces the growing militarization of the police since the Nixon Administration used the war on drugs to justify “no-knock” warrants and the arming of local police with military-grade weapons. Balko cites statistics that show the inexorable turning of the police from a community resource that keeps us safe to a military operation that often treats the homes and neighborhoods like an army of occupation treats the region it has conquered:

  • Every decade more cities have SWAT teams, which are military-style units that assault urban locations, to the point that 77% of all cities with more than 25,000 has one.
  • Every decade has seen a dramatic increase in the number of SWAT raids conducted in the United States. For example the number of SWAT deployments grew by more than 937% from 1980 to 1995!
  • Every decade the Supreme Court has eroded the “castle doctrine” (which prevents the police from storming a domicile without due cause) by redefining exigent circumstances, expanding the proper use of “no-knock” warrants and diminishing the time police have to wait between giving notice and breaking down the doors and barging in guns roaring.
  • Every decade, the number of incidents of police raids of innocent people has increased, a natural function of the increase in SWAT raids and the shoddy handling of police raid requests by judges.
  • Every decade, the U.S. Department of Defense has dumped more tanks, weaponry and other military equipment on police departments.
  • Balko also follows the development of the shoot-to-kill mentality among police officers, the “us-and-them” thinking that may be appropriate to a war situation but doesn’t belong on the streets of a free society.
Before 9/11, the war on drugs was used to justify arming the police with military-grade equipment and playing fast-and-fancy with the Third and Fourth Amendments. But even after 9/11 and the rise of the specter of terrorism, virtually all uses of this equipment across the country have been to raid homes suspected of harboring drugs and drug dealers.

Democrats and Republicans have tripped over each other to see who can scare the public worse and call for more funding of the unwinnable drug war. For example, Clinton put a retired military officer in charge of the war on drugs and started the active recruitment of former military personnel for police departments. Raids on medical marijuana facilities and on illegal immigrants increased significantly under Obama.

The following set of numbers from 1972 that Balko gives us exemplifies the way that politicians representing all parts of the American political spectrum have jumped on the bandwagon to make local police military units: In 1972, President Richard Nixon declared that heroin addicts stole $2 billion each year to support their habit. Democratic ultra-liberal presidential candidate George McGovern said heroin addicts really stole $4.4 billion a year. A Nixon administration drug treatment expert said it was $6.3 billion. Illinois Senator Charles Percy upped the ante to $10-$15 billion. Still 1972, a White House briefing book distributed to the press put the amount stolen by heroin addicts at $18 billion.

By the way, the total value of all property reported stolen in the United States in 1972 was $1.2 billion, a lot less than the lowest of these ridiculous estimates.

In the typical raid described in Balko’s book, the police obtain a “no-knock” warrant based on information from an informant who has proven to be unreliable in the past and then barge into the wrong home with less than 15 seconds’ notice, pistol whip people, shoot to kill if anyone makes a false move, rip the place apart looking for drugs, arrest people even if nothing is found, never apologize when they finally discover they hit the wrong house and are never reprimanded or face any consequences for their mistake. Prosecutors and judges take the attitude that the police can do no wrong, which partially explains why police departments and unions absurdly believe that even the mildest of criticism threatens not just the ability of the police to maintain order but the safety of individual police officers. (FYI, the murder rate among cops is far lower than the general murder rate in every state.)

Even when the police hit the right house, the SWAT approach of overwhelming a house or a neighborhood with no prior warning is almost always overkill, since the average drug dealer is not dangerous and typically carries no weapons. Smaller dealers get it far worse, since the courts have ruled that while a large drug distributor could not possibly destroy the evidence in a few minutes, small dealers could—therefore let’s not give them any warning.

The most frightening trend that Balko details is the push of police departments towards focusing on these military-style operations in their recruitment efforts. Instead of trying to attract people interested in “serving and protecting,” current police marketing materials all too often appeal to those whose like to fight and shoot off guns. They make great soldiers but trigger-happy police officers.

The biggest absurdity of course is that the goal of this over-arming of the police and stripping of constitutional rights is to stop a victimless crime.

Balko is a libertarian, a hired gun of the Cato Institute, which probably explains why he doesn’t explain what I believe is the main reason for the militarization of American police departments: racism. Remember that the original Nixon push to erode constitutional rights and turn the police into an occupying force came at the height of the civil rights movement after a number of riots broke out in our inner cities. Drug laws have always been stiffer for those drugs used primarily by Afro-Americans than those used in white suburbs, and the criminal justice system has applied much worse punishments to blacks than to whites convicted of the same drug possession and dealing offenses. Balko’s horde of anecdotes of wrong raids and raids gone wrong is color-blind, but we know that the percentage of raids on minorities has always been far, far greater than their representation in the general population. We also know that blacks are over-represented in the numbers of people killed by police.

The other factor in police militarization is the lobbying effort of military contractors. Our federal, state and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars on equipment and weaponry that is pretty much inappropriate for most domestic policing. But the suppliers of these armaments have been minting money and using quite a bit of it to influence politicians in both parties to support this dangerous and un-American domestic arms race.

The print version of the New York Times looks like a great regional newspaper of 1990

By Marc Jampole

I couldn’t help but notice the sudden outcrop of advice columns in the printed edition of The New York Times. The Times now has five weekly advice columns, one each for etiquette, job issues, ethics, real estate matters and consumer complaints, at least to my count. Who knows, maybe I’m missing one.

These columns are cheap to produce—the readers create half the content with their questions and the other half—the answers—are almost always warmed-over information or packaged homilies. There is no difference between these columns and the syndicated columnists like “Hints from Heloise” or “Dear Abby” that local newspapers have published for at least a century. I can remember when the Times had no advice columns, which typically are a staple of local and regional newspapers. Then for years the only advice column in the Times was the “Ethicist” in the Sunday magazine.

The front page of the Times is now also different from what it used to be, focusing very little on breaking news except for the very big stories like the Charlie Hebdo massacre or revelations that the Times investigative reporters have dredged up like the collapse of the market for taxi medallions. Instead, the front page contains analysis of news that happened earlier in the week, investigative pieces and high-end gee-whiz features. I suppose that the assumption of the editors is that you already know what the news is from perusing the Internet. 

The print edition of the Times carries less news than ever before, and for most international and real non-political national news, is relying more on the Associated Press and other wire services than ever before.

Pick up a Times and if you’re older than 40, the first thing you’ll feel is the lack of heft to it. It kind of feels like a good regional newspaper from the 1990s. You know, something like the St. Louis Dispatch or the Syracuse Post-Standard, with lots of local columns, frequent award-winning investigative reports and advice columns from national and regional experts. Of course, these regional papers typically used columnists from the Times, Washington Post and other national newspapers, whereas reading the Times, you got to see Charles Blow, Paul Krugman and Gail Collins a day early. No more, since you can easily find their columns on the Internet the day before the print version hits the streets.

I was enumerating these signs of the decline of what was once the greatest mainstream newspaper in the United States to someone the other day when she asked me what I would do differently if I owned the Times.

My response is that the Times management made all its mistakes early in the Internet game by buying into the nonsense that just because it’s on the Internet, it has to be free.  If I had operated the Times at the dawn of the information age, I would have done the following:
1.      Charged the same amount to see the newspaper on line as to receive a home delivery.
2.      Not given any free samples to visitors to the website.
3.      Offered the newspaper or selected articles to various Internet news portals such as Yahoo! and Google News on a strict pay-for-usage basis.
4.      Hired a bevy of sharp minds to surf the net for copyright infringements and prosecute all of them aggressively. By copyright infringement, I don’t mean referencing articles or quoting from them in other news media and blogs, but printing an article verbatim without permission and payment.
5.      Given free subscriptions to the online edition of the Times to every public library and public school library across the country.

In other words, I would have defended the castle, which in this case means asserting that the basic value of the newspaper is not in its paper or electronic imagery but in the information it contains. In effect, I would have had the Times say, “We can and will translate the value of the information we gather to dollars and cents and set a price on it. But we will always provide those who can’t afford direct access to the newspaper a free way to still get the information.” Sounds like the traditional relationship that news media has had with the economy and the community.

Taking the approach I suggested might have hurt the Times profit margin for a while, but newspaper profit margins were notoriously fat, so I imagine the owners could have afforded it. I’m convinced that the rest of the publishing industry would have followed this same strategy for transferring the media to the Internet, if the Times and other big media players would have shown them the way.

Although implementing this harsh approach would cost billions more today than it would have if the news industry had started with it 18-20 years ago, it could still be done. But instead, the Times and virtually all other American newspapers prefer to continue to slide—following fewer news stories, doing more rehashes and relying more on news services. It wouldn’t matter if Internet media were replacing the traditional print and broadcast media in covering and uncovering the news. But it’s not. The Internet relies more on quoting secondary news sources and giving commentary than even the daily newspapers.

The result is that newspaper revenues and readership continue to decline, while Americans are more ignorant of the world around them then they were 10, 20 and 30 years ago. 

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Kreneck's Pet Projects

Art by Kevin Kreneck

Monday, January 5, 2015

New Yorker story tells anecdote that seems impossible on the surface

By Marc Jampole
Sometimes you just know that either the reporter is lying or has been hornswoggled by the person she/he is quoting. Maybe it’s because everything seems so pat and happens in accordance with commonly held ideas including false ones.
Or in the case of Andrew Marantz’s article titled “The Virologist” in The New Yorker, you smell a lie (as Joseph Conrad put it in Heart of Darkness) because the facts are not verisimilar—they do not correspond to what happens in the real world.
Here’s the quote—and anyone who has ever played, had a child who played or coached Little League baseball will immediately recognize how unlike reality it is. The article, BTW, is about Emerson Spartz, a 27-year-old wunderkind who uses his so-called natural genius and some software algorithms to make the articles that he posts on websites—mostly plagiarized—go viral on the Internet:
When Emerson Spartz was a child in La Porte, Indiana, he had the highest batting average on his Little League team. “I quickly started seeing patterns,” he told me. His coach instructed only the fastest players to steal bases. Spartz was not fast, but he noticed that the catchers were unpracticed at throwing to second base, allowing runners to advance. “I started stealing pretty much every time,” he said. “It worked extremely well, but that wasn’t what the coach cared about, apparently.” To punish Spartz for disobedience, the coach batted him eighth. “I gave him a statistical explanation of why it made no sense to put your best hitter at the bottom of the order,” Spartz said. “You can imagine how that went over.” 
A load of hooey.
Little League, for the uninformed, is for 10-12 year olds. In the Minor and Intermediate leagues for kids under 10, no stealing is allowed. By the time the kids get to Pony and Colt leagues (for the kids older than 12), everyone but the real players have dropped out of organized baseball and so most teams have a pretty good catcher.
But in Little League, every manager knows to have every single player try to steal second base until the catcher demonstrates that she-he can make the throw and the shortstop demonstrates he-she’ll be there to take the catch and tag the runner. The catcher can often be so shaky and the pitcher’s move to home plate so slow that everyone runs—until the other side starts to gun ‘em down.  It’s not even a strategic consideration, such as whether to play your fifth best player at third or in center field; or when to bring in the fast pitcher who may walk a lot of hitters or the control kid whom the other side is definitely going to hit. I coached in two Little Leagues and my son played in three (including an all-star league) and every single manager ran his players until one or two kids got caught or until they knew the capabilities of the other team.
What that means is it’s unlikely Spartz’ coach told only the fast players on the team to run against weak-throwing catchers. Everyone was running until the other teams showed they could stop it.
The other false note in Spartz’s story is that his punishment disobeying the coach was to bat eighth. It would never happen that way. Never. When coaches on any team in any youth sports wants or needs to discipline a player, they bench the player. Sometimes coaches are too slow to bench, sometimes too fast, sometimes they are inconsistent in their pattern of discipline—but no coach chooses to punish a player by dropping him in the batting order. You reserve dropping in the batting order for good players who are in a batting slump; or when another player is hitting so well you have to move him-her up; or when a player is coming back from an injury or other layoff. Again, I’m not talking about strategies about which there is any dispute. Everyone does it.
Assuming that he didn’t fabricate it himself. I can see why Marantz wanted to believe Spartz’s tale of Little League rebellion. It fits the character that Marantz is so assiduously drawing in the rest of the article:
  • He uses math…
  • …to figures out stuff…
  • …that other, more experienced people miss…
  • …with a courage of convictions to keep doing what he knows is right…
  • …with disdain for the authority…
  • ..who doesn’t like that his rebellion is a success.
The incident encapsulates what Marantz spends more than 5,500 words trying to say, but it couldn’t possibly have happened the way Marantz says Spartz describes it. Even if Marantz didn’t play Little League ball as a kid (or any sport, since all youth sports punish through benching), he should have known enough to ask someone. Isn’t that what fact-checking is all about? And what about Marantz’s editor or the stable of fact-checkers The New Yorker must employ? Were they all so dazzled by the idea of a rebellious boy genius seeing what adults missed that they didn’t think to ask someone what really happens in a Little League game?
This obvious whopper of a whopper throws into doubt all the other facts about Spartz’s life and business. But the article is nonetheless worth a read as it encapsulates the end game of the capitalist approach to entertainment and the arts. The end goal is not communicating a message—lofty or false—or even entertaining. No the end goal is to get eyeballs to see the piece, so that advertisers will pay to be on the website that sponsors the article, photo array, or in the case of much of Spartz’s content, list (of celebrities with something in common, the most or least of good and bad attributes, the cutest, the sexiest, the oldest, et al.).  All artistic success reduces to eyeballs on the page, which we can then transform into the lowest of all denominators—cash value.
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