Domestic Policy – Page 49 – The Wrongologist

Learned Ignorance in Texas

Why does conservative America try to intentionally withhold historical information?

Consider the latest effort to whitewash American history textbooks. Here is this interpretation of slavery as immigrant labor in the “Patterns of Immigration” section of McGraw-Hill’s textbook, “World Geography”:

The photo above was texted by 15 year-old Coby Dean-Burren to his mother, Roni. The WaPo quoted Roni Dean-Burren:

This is erasure…This is revisionist history — retelling the story however the winners would like it told. In calling slaves ‘workers’ and their move to the United States ‘immigration’

As she noted in Facebook posts last Wednesday and Thursday, the textbook suggests not only that her African American ancestors arrived on the continent willingly, but also that they were compensated for their labor.

This is another skirmish in a broader effort to promote theocracy and remove references to major social justice issues in American textbooks. The NYT 2010 story that is linked above reported on the Texas Board of Education approving a social studies curriculum that put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light. For example, the board:

Cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

Anyway, McGraw-Hill Education sought to address the issue with a statement saying that while their geography program:

Meets the learning objectives of the course…our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves. To communicate these facts more clearly, we will update this caption to describe the arrival of African slaves in the U.S. as a forced migration and emphasize that their work was done as slave labor.

Apparently the changes will be made in the textbook’s digital version and included in its next run. WaPo reports that Dean-Burren has mixed feelings about the outcome:

On a surface level, ‘yay’…I understand that McGraw-Hill is a textbook giant, so thumbs up for listening.

On the other hand, she indicated that few students use the digital version, and since her son’s textbook is brand new (copyright year 2016), another print version is unlikely to come out for ten years.

According to WaPo, as recently as last year, scholars reviewing textbooks based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills guidelines found a number of historical misrepresentations, among them several in McGraw-Hill’s proposed textbooks. The issues included:

• Declaring that a Muslim garb hinders women’s rights
• Mitigating the inequalities African Americans faced under Jim Crow
• Representing slavery as only a secondary cause of the Civil War

After all, if they can keep kids from learning about the reality of our history, they’ll be less likely to be sensitive to solutions that address long-term inequality, or that promote religious and cultural diversity.

Conservatives give us lots of information, it just isn’t usually completely true. There is a large group of pundits who are well paid to spread disinformation in comment pieces each week, and it’s hard to recall any of them ever suffering any discomfort for lying.

Think about how conservatives attempt to block progress–whether it is our history, climate change, or civil rights. They use three basic arguments: 1) it didn’t (isn’t) happening; 2) its too late to do anything anyway; 3) it will cost too much. They emphasize whichever argument the circumstances require.

The modern conservative game plan includes learned ignorance. They know they’re wrong on many of the issues, so they hope to limit access to data and truth.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – October 4, 2015

Quite the week. Another mass shooting, Kim Davis said she met the Pope, Russia drops bombs in Syria, and we dodge another government shut-down.

The shooting in Oregon was a huge tragedy, but the Right says the shooter was a member of a “well-regulated militia”, so there is nothing we can do:

When He heard about the Kim Davis meeting, God tweeted:

Despite the hype by Ms. Davis’ camp, the Vatican said:

The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects…

We avoided the shut-down, but expect to see it again in December:

Can cooler heads prevail in the GOP? That’s a no-Boehner:

The foreign policy conversation in the US remains fixed on the idea that we can dictate terms to whomever we want, where ever we want, on whatever timetable we want. And we love, love the idea of regime change:

With the Planned Parenthood hearings, the GOP made its real position clear:

More GOP Dickitude

Dickitude was on display at the House Oversight Committee hearing into Planned Parenthood (PP). Committee Chair, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) repeatedly interrupted PP President Cecile Richards as she tried to answer his questions Tuesday. Richards’ testimony was part of an investigation into PP’s business practices after sting videos were released that allegedly showed company executives discussing the sale of fetal tissue. Chaffetz took the time to note Richards’ salary.

Your compensation in 2009 was $353,000. Is that correct? he asked. ‘I don’t have the figures with me, but —‘Richards said. ‘It was,’ Chaffetz replied, ‘Congratulations.’

That had to be the first time in the recorded history that a Republican has criticized a CEO for making money. But, Richards provided the best moment of the day when Chaffetz was caught in a Fiorina-like lie after he pontificated on a projected slide:

CHAFFETZ: You’re going to deny that…
RICHARDS: I’m going to deny this slide that you just showed me that no one has ever provided us before! We’ve provided you all the information about everything — all the services that Planned Parenthood provides. And it doesn’t feel like we’re trying to get to the truth here. You just showed me this.
CHAFFETZ: I pulled those numbers directly out of your corporate reports!
RICHARDS: [legal team tells her something] Excuse me. My lawyers have informed me that the source of this is Americans United for Life, which is an anti-abortion group. So I would check your source.
CHAFFETZ: [looking caught off-guard, stammering] then we will get to the bottom of the truth of that.

Shouldn’t they call the anti-abortion groups that created the fake chart (and the fake videos) to testify?

But, Dickitude doesn’t require a dick. We know that Carly Fiorina did not start the PP fire, but fanned the flames by her vivid comments during the 2nd Republican debate on Sept. 16th. Then, no one could find the section of the video that Carly said she saw.

Things seemed to go from bad to worse when a new video entitled “Carly Fiorina was right”, issued by The Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, and purporting to show a PP abortion showed up this week. It quickly got traction in the media, but then things went from bad to worse: Dr. Jennifer Gunter, a board-certified OB/GYN took to her blog after viewing it. Dr. Gunter’s conclusion is that it was a premature delivery. She disputed Greg Cunningham, curator of the video, and the founder of the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s finding, who told Time Magazine that it had to be an abortion:

Owing to the lack of medical treatment offered to the fetus.

Dr. Gunter says that Cunningham was wrong, since the fetus is 17-18 weeks and thus, previable, and that no doctor would render care in that circumstance. She goes on to say:

A neonatologist who attempts to resuscitate a 17 week delivery would be considered unethical.

Her final point was that there is no proof this video is in a PP clinic much less in the US. And hours after the publication of the video, several medical experts contacted by Time Magazine raised questions about whether the video showed an abortion.

These attempts to defund PP are a form of pandering to the anti-abortion wing of the Republican base. The base doesn’t care about literal truth when all them little angel babies are being massacred by the socialists.

Fiorina’s description of video evidence of PP performing a horrible procedure looks to be untrue, particularly since the footage:

• Didn’t come from the videos Fiorina was discussing
• There’s no evidence that the footage comes from PP
• There’s very good evidence that it doesn’t involve an abortion

Even if we grant that Fiorina was confused on the night of Sept. 16th when she made her statement about the video, the only way to explain her continued insistence that what she saw is real is to say she’s too stupid, too stubborn to admit she’s wrong, and/or that she’s a liar.

None of these are good qualities to have in a president.

Yet, the Right sees it exactly the other way: They think these are great qualities to have in a president. It’s a perfect projection of themselves onto an extremely powerful person, one who doesn’t give two fucks about reality, facts and evidence, and will lead from the gut.

That’s how we ended up in Iraq.

The “System” of Prisons

Politicians throw the term “reform” around all the time, and it usually means nothing. One problem that most agree requires reform is the US prison system. VICE did a fantastic job with their report, “Fixing the System,” which aired on HBO, about America’s broken criminal justice system. You can see it on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTL_3WL5gfw

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can see the video here.

In July, VICE followed Mr. Obama to the El Reno Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, and recorded the first time a presently serving president sat down with a bunch of inmates at a prison. He talked about their families, how they got into crime, why they copped a plea, what kind of businesses they’d like to start, how they might get financing to start those businesses, what kind of responsibilities they have as parents and to their communities, the reasons for and against the War on Drugs, and the impact of the cycle of mass incarceration on communities of color.

Perhaps a little background. The US has 2.2 million prison inmates. China is second with 1.5 million, and Russia third with 874,000. According to PrisonPolicy.org, The US incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. And Vox reports that 16 US states have more people in prisons than in college housing!

The HBO show says that this era of mass incarceration came about due to the war on drugs which focused on crack cocaine, meaning that many nonviolent people of color wound up in prison. Next, mandatory-minimum sentencing laws led to a throw-away-the-key culture, with long, destructive prison terms.

Well, leave it to David Brooks to take exception yesterday to the common view that prison reform would be a net positive for American society:

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90% of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17% of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

See what he did there? Brooks reframed the discussion to state prisons. Sadly, on the federal level, 48% were in prison for drug crimes, according to Department of Justice statistics. Brooks also misunderstands that the Federal sentencing minimums do not necessarily apply in state courts. He is incorrect that states hold 90% of prisoners. They hold 64%, or 1.4 million of the 2.2 million prisoners. They do hold the vast majority of violent offenders, with 725,000 (53%) jailed for violent offenses. Brooks wanders around and at the end, lands in his typically happy place:

Lifting the spirits of inmates, as described in the outstanding Atlantic online video “Angola for Life,” can also help. But the fundamental situation won’t be altered without a comprehensive surge, unless we flood the zone with economic, familial, psychological and social repair.

Well, Mr. Brooks, if you wanted to make sure that nothing changed, you would recommend waiting for an entire cluster of problems to be addressed, not one of which is remotely likely to happen. He doesn’t support any solutions. And he studiously avoids the stacked deck that makes the prison population so black.

He also missed the other elephant in the room. You can’t escape the parallel between mass incarceration and the growth of for-profit prisons. These corporations have contracts that require that cities and states provide them sufficient prisoners to meet an agreed number, or pay the prison in cash.

This incentivizes putting people behind bars, and should have nothing to do with free market capitalism. This is a policy error that must be corrected.

Two final points:

• Crime flourishes in areas where economic abandonment has produced poor schools and poor prospects. Yet Brooks has argued in the past that the minimum wage should not be raised, that welfare is wasted on moochers, and that the social safety net is too expensive to maintain.
• The plea-bargain system is another culprit. Somewhere in the 1970s, prosecutors figured out an easier way. Threaten an accused with massive charges and punishments, and then propose a plea bargain to a lesser charge. Because people are risk-averse, and/or do not have the money to hire the lawyers to fight the worst charges, they accept the plea bargain and end up in jail, without a trial. This is why it’s always important (if you can do so) to get in contact with a firm such as Mark Rees Law and similar alternatives to ensure you get a fair trial when it comes to your court date.

Conservatives like to cite the number of one-parent households and how the lack of both parents around makes it more likely that a child from a poor area will become a criminal. Mr. Brooks seems to think that releasing non-violent drug offenders from prison will not have much effect on society. But many prisoners are parents.

How many children could have a parent back with them, and maybe avoid incarceration themselves?

See the documentary. Reform the system!

Monday Wake Up Call – September 28, 2015

Wrongo and Ms. Oh So Right were in South Hero VT for the weekend. Here is a pic just after sunset, looking west towards Plattsburg NY. There is little fall color in Northern Vermont yet:

A few thoughts about Boehner’s resignation. Boehner faced a choice between a coup and a shutdown. That led him to make a deal with the Teahadists: If he stepped down as Speaker, they would vote for a “clean” Continuing Resolution (CR) and avoid a government shutdown. Several members of the Freedom Caucus, the conservative group that led the revolt against Boehner’s leadership, said they will now support the spending bill without demands that it include language to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood. Alex Pareene summed up the Boehner era:

It was not a distinguished tenure. His meager accomplishments came in spite of himself and to the great consternation of his Republican colleagues. He pinballed from one pathetic humiliation, usually at the hands of his own caucus, to the next. The only reason Boehner remained speaker for as long as he did—to his eternal regret, it is clear—is because his bitterest opponents were too stupid to figure out how to oust him, and his likeliest replacements never wanted the job.

So, at least as of the time this is written, the corporate wing of the GOP will get their clean funding bill (and retain a shot at the Presidency next year), at the same time, the Teahadists are allowed a “victory” by getting rid of Boehner. The corporate wing will insert another one of their guys in the Speaker position and a year down the road, Boehner is out from under the lobbyist rules, and goes on to a job paying 10 times of his current salary.

But we’ve got unfinished business, like the transportation bill, the Debt Ceiling and the Omnibus Spending Bill to keep government functioning into next year. These will be left for the next Speaker.

The GOP establishment looks to be fragmenting into two parts. They have the majority, but they have lost Eric Cantor, their rain-maker. Boehner, another rainmaker and cat-herder, is now gone. McConnell has now lost the air support he used to enjoy from the House. Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ), a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, suggested that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may need to be the next head on the chopping block, particularly for his unwillingness to get rid of the Senate filibuster. From Salmon:

We made a lot of promises to the American people, that if we took the Senate, that we would do certain things and those things have not been accomplished…A lot of the problems we are engaged in is because the Senate doesn’t take any action on anything and there’s nothing that any presidential candidate on our side says that will ever be realized as long as the modern-day filibuster is enacted in the way it is today.

The firebrands in the House say that Sen. Ted Cruz is the defacto leader of the party. The Presidential primaries might determine a different leader, but the establishment wing of the GOP doesn’t have the control it used to have.

But, all is good in the cesspool. So, let’s try to wake up both John Boehner and the Freedom Caucus. Here are The Rolling Stones with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, recorded live at the Max in October 1990 and released in 1991:

For those who read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.

Pope Francis on Capitalism

With the Pope starting his visit to the US, most focus will be on Conservatives’ support for the Catholic Church’s views against abortion and gay marriage. Conservatives are far less enthusiastic about Francis’ views about climate change and capitalism, both of which are covered in Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si’.

While the Wrongologist has not read Laudato Si´, he did read an extensive and thoughtful review by William Nordhaus in the NY Review of Books, who says the Pope thinks that the degradation of our environment is a symptom of deeper problems: rapid change, unsustainable over-consumption, indifference to the poor, and the decay of social values.

Nordhaus notes that the encyclical contains an extensive discussion of the features of markets and modern capitalism. It emphasizes dysfunctional tendencies and distortions, witness his criticism of excessive consumption:

Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism is one example of how the techno-economic paradigm affects individuals. [Paragraph 203]

And Francis’ criticism of the distorting effect of the drive for profit:

Once more, we need to reject a magical conception of the market, which would suggest that problems can be solved simply by an increase in the profits of companies or individuals. Is it realistic to hope that those who are obsessed with maximizing profits will stop to reflect on the environmental damage which they will leave behind for future generations? [Paragraph 190]

Nordhaus quotes Francis, who argues that profit-seeking is the source of environmental degradation:

The principle of the maximization of profits, frequently isolated from other considerations, reflects a misunderstanding of the very concept of the economy. As long as production is increased, little concern is given to whether it is at the cost of future resources or the health of the environment; as long as the clearing of a forest increases production, no one calculates the losses entailed in the desertification of the land, the harm done to biodiversity or the increased pollution. In a word, businesses profit by calculating and paying only a fraction of the costs involved. [Paragraph 195]

Francis singles out financiers for special disapproval:

In the meantime, economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment…. [Paragraph 56]

The Pope criticizes capitalism’s push to make ultra-consumers of everyone:

This paradigm [consumerism] leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. [Paragraph 203]

Pure capitalism ignores two major shortcomings of those economies run by Mr. Market: The first is the emergence of monopolies, or things like unregulated pollution, which distort market outcomes. The second is inequality of opportunities and income. And much has been written about rising income inequality, particularly by Seitz and Piketty, and Joseph Stiglitz.

However, it would be inaccurate to point solely to the depletion of resources or pollution as major causes of rising poverty. Instead, it is forces such as the labor-saving nature of new technologies like robots, rising imports from low- and middle-income countries, and the capture of our income taxing system by corporations and the wealthy that have distorted our markets.

Specifically, as economist Arthur Okun has written, markets do not have automatic mechanisms to guarantee an equitable distribution of income and wealth:

Given the chance, [the market] would sweep away all other values, and establish a vending-machine society. The rights and powers that money should not buy must be protected with detailed regulations and sanctions, and with countervailing aids to those with low incomes. Once those rights are protected and economic deprivation is ended, I believe that our society would be more willing to let the competitive market have its place.

So, as this week rolls out, expect to hear many voices on the right argue that Francis is an unrealistic economic fool. In particular, expect to hear George Will’s arguments this week in the National Review echoed by the media. Here is a representative quote from Mr. Will: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media…He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.

See what George Will did there? He says that climate denialism is pro-science, while belief in climate change is anti-science.

Know the enemy by their arguments.

9-11-2001

It is now 14 years since this happened:

South Tower falls: 9:59am September 11, 2001

And 14 years on, what have we learned? In Islam, there is an idea that you should deal with your local problems first, and not worry about the far enemy. But, bin Laden believed that in his world, you could not do that. Revolution at home was almost impossible because of the far enemy, the US. As long as the US was the superpower, Islamic revolutionary success would be limited because the US could cripple your economy via sanctions, and it had the military might to attack you with overwhelming force.

Bin Laden’s argument was that the US had to be defeated, at least as regards its ability to project power in the ME. He thought that the evils being done by local regimes (such as Iraq’s Hussein, or Egypt’s Mubarak) could not be ended by simply fighting the local regime, but that the far regime that was their protector, must also be defeated.

Whatever you think of bin Laden, his most powerful point to those in the ME was that the US was responsible both for the suffering the US caused directly through sanctions, and the suffering caused indirectly, by keeping Middle Eastern dictators in power.

To that, bin Laden added a decisive idea: Attack the US.

Fourteen years later, we remain in a quagmire. Thanks a heap, Osama bin Laden. With a small number of supporters, less than $500,000, and 19 suicidal hijackers, most of them Saudis, you pulled off your geopolitical magic trick. On this 14th anniversary, Tom Englehardt asks a few questions:

• Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that the US military has been unable to extricate itself from Iraq and Afghanistan, its two major wars of this century?
• Fourteen years later, don’t you find it improbable that Washington’s post-9/11 policies in the Middle East helped lead to the establishment of the Islamic State’s “Caliphate” in parts of Iraq and Syria and to a movement of almost unparalleled extremism that has successfully “franchised” itself out from Libya to Nigeria to Afghanistan?
• If, on September 12, 2001, you had predicted such a possibility, who wouldn’t have thought you mad?

This brings us to the 2016 presidential election. Sarah Palin on CNN last Sunday, said she’d “rather have a tough president than one who can win at trivial pursuit.” As Ed Kilgore wrote:

By saying that she prefers a “tough” president like Donald Trump, Palin is endorsing his bullying Alpha-male routine against all those emasculated men who know stuff.

So, more of the same from the GOP.

To be fair, “knowing stuff” is a necessary, but insufficient criterion. Obviously, Trump doesn’t seem to have the “necessary” part down just yet. Republicans try to convince us that the challenges we face in the world are simple, and we must be realists, and aggressively go after what we want. It all comes down to “good vs evil.” For Reagan, it was the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. And for George W. Bush, it was the “axis of evil” made up of Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

Sadly, we live in an extremely complex world, and ignorance of its complexity is dangerous. Remember in 2006, there were reports that George W. Bush was unaware of the difference between Shia and Sunni as late as two months before the Iraq invasion. Combine that with Cheney’s Exceptionalist ideology, (which remained on display this week), and we all paid a huge price for that ignorance.

The reality is that if tough talk is divorced from knowledge, you do dumb things…like start dumb wars that diminish our standing in the world – and that cost us terribly in lives and money.

The GOP considers diplomacy, compromise, or nonviolent remedies to be weak and ineffective. It never occurs to them that knowledge, perspective and persistence are also forms of strength.

We should be very clear that the presidency is no place for bullies. And rather than signifying weakness, traits like compassion, thoughtfulness and collaboration are exactly the kind of thing we need in our leader.

We need to re-learn how to exist in in an ambiguous world without shutting down, or being ineffectual. Lately when things get tough, we strut, shorten our attention spans, prefer form over substance and pray to god that it all works out…we have all become George W. Bush!

Let’s remember the 9/11 heroes and victims.

But let’s stop listening to those who pander to our fears.

The Political Stylings of Donald Trump

We see a torrent of Trumpism, and viewed from the sidelines, it is a presidential candidacy based on emotion, while shockingly lacking in policy. It is difficult to see him succeeding, unless Republicans believe that being a vain, obnoxious and unapologetic old uncle is all that it takes to run the world’s largest superpower.

If that’s what they think, they have found their man.

The Donald has co-opted Tea Party rage. But, there’s nothing to grab onto, except the rage itself. He and his supporters hate immigrants. They hate Mr. Obama’s withdrawal from our blundering wars in the ME. They hate the vastly expanded access to healthcare coverage, and apparently, they hate being rescued from a Republican Depression. They do love them some American Exceptionalism, though.

As Bloomberg’s Melinda Henneberger comments about a recent Trump rally in New Hampshire:

Very little of what the conservatives in the hall were going wild over could be characterized as conservative, and most of it wasn’t political at all.

What Trump wants us to believe is; “I’ve got this.” His strategy is to have us believe he is a strongman brimming with rage. His “tell it like it is” approach has a true populist appeal, but his slogan “Make America Great Again” is as vague as it can be. Here are a few NH quotes: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

We will make great trade deals.

We will have Social Security without cuts.

We will come up with health care plans that will be phenomenal, phenomenal, [and] that will be less expensive.

Describing a future-perfect conversation between President Trump and the Ford Motor Co. officials, he’ll change their minds about building cars in Mexico. He says:

This is too easy, too easy! This is a couple of phone calls.

Some Trump supporters will vote for him, some will not, but all like his honesty, his lack of PC, his ability to run without outside money, his success, his independence from America’s political elite.

Krugman says the conservative explanation of the GOP’s onset of Trumpism is that their base voters are victims of celebrity. What they really want is a true conservative, but they’re being hoodwinked by someone who is entertaining on TV.

Krugman thinks the liberal version is that Trump is appealing to resentment that ultimately rests on economic failure: working-class whites have been left behind by growing income inequality, while they mistakenly blame immigrants taking their jobs. But he thinks Trump’s supporters look a lot more like the Tea Party, who are:

For the most part not working-class…They’re relatively affluent, and not especially lacking in college degrees.

Republicans seem to be in a mood to require heavy doses of impatience, resentment and outrage from any successful 2016 presidential candidate. Trump realized that sooner than his competitors, and neatly fills the bill. He is disorienting the Establishment Right. His supporters don’t give his political platform much thought, which works, since thoughtlessness is at the base of most of Trump’s policy cure-alls. He is cleaving the Republican Party into one camp that gawks helplessly at its past and a new camp that is inserting a shiv in the Establishment Right’s tired old body.

For progressives, what’s not to love? Trump said on Meet The Press: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

And if I’m president, we’re going to have a great country…And then we will really have [it] better than Reagan, better than anybody. We will make America great again. That’s what it’s all about.

Ok, Chuck Todd, you can’t ask: “How?”

Trump is the expression of today’s conservatism: loud, abrasive, and vacuous. Forget data, forget policy. Why search for evidence when you can rely on belief and tradition?

There are two options: Republicans either oust Trump and his Trumpeteers, perhaps forcing them to form a third party. Or, Republicans can accept that Trump is in their mainstream, and run a populist platform, laced with doses of anger and vague policies. If he is the Republican nominee for President, Republicans will then witness the Trumpocalypse, and be picking up the pieces for years.

Those are the choices. Either way, contemporary conservatism will be in ruins.

What’s not to love?

Too Much Focus on GDP

(Wrongo is back from his project. Regular blogging begins again today.)

In our lifetime, Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, has been transformed from a narrow economic indicator to our universal yardstick of progress. This spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP ignores central facts such as quality, costs, or purpose. It only measures output: more cars, more accidents; more lawyers, more trials; more extraction, and more pollution. All count as success in the GDP equation. In fact, our cumulative real GDP growth since 2008 is 6.9%.

But we need to focus on other yardsticks to understand what is really going on with our economy. First, take a look at the growth in job openings (blue line) vs. growth in hourly wages (red line):

In the past, the two have usually moved in tandem, which makes sense, since the laws of supply and demand should also apply to employment. But since 2011, and most notably in the past year, they have diverged starkly, with wages drifting back to where they were in 2012, while unfilled job openings have skyrocketed: Job openings are now higher than at the height of the tech boom in 2000. And yet, worker’s wages um, suck.

What happened? Perhaps huge numbers of people are now returning to the labor market after years on the sidelines. We know that many people want a job, but stopped searching for lack of opportunities, while many others want more than the part-time work they’ve managed to find. The uneven pace of wage growth shows there is plenty of slack in the labor market. This is supported by Bloomberg’s report that we still need another 2.4 million jobs to reach “full employment”, (5.1%).

So by definition, we can’t be in a tight labor market.

Some of the difficulties driving American job growth are the problems in the global economy. We see low growth in the developed world, coupled with the continuing impact of automation and the movement of much of our remaining manufacturing jobs to low-wage developing nations.

Take a look at another chart, showing the growth in productivity vs. growth in wages:

Hourly compensation grew in tandem with productivity until 1973. After 1973, productivity grew, but the typical worker’s compensation has been relatively stagnant. This divergence of pay and productivity has meant that the majority of workers did not benefit from productivity growth.

This is another way of saying that the economy could afford higher pay, but didn’t provide it.

The analysis confirms that since 1973, the largest factor driving the gap between productivity and median compensation has been the growing inequality of wages. The divergence between wages and productivity we see above, along with increasing concentration of wealth in the very top of the social strata, are not just correlated, they have a causal relationship.

The two charts demonstrate the shift of income from labor to capital. Larry Mishel of EPI notes that from 2000 to 2011, there was a shift from income derived from labor to income derived from capital, accounting for roughly 45% of the gap shown above.

Workers have lost their share of gains in productivity. It was stolen by capital.

Thorsten Veblen distinguished between the Captain of Business, whose focus was on goods production, and the Captain of Finance, who concerned himself with manipulating money. He deplored the replacement of Industry by Finance; and the situation today is far worse than in the early 1900s. (Veblen died in 1929.)

The development of finance since the late 1970s has been near-pathological. It has been essentially unregulated, left free to become an oversized parasite. It has assimilated more and more of our traditional economic activity through “financialization“. The recklessness of that was made clear by its damage to the housing market in 2008, followed by the huge loss of jobs that occurred in its aftermath.

It is that crisis that leaves wages weak today. It is those jobs that we have been looking for the past eight years.

It is well past time to put finance back in its place. The Dodd-Frank law will never be enough, since it continues to allow the very innovations in finance that can take down the financial system, even while pretending to decrease them.

Capitalism has a phenomenal capacity to lift people out of poverty. But it does so at a cost. Capitalism changed before, and it’s time for it to change again. Free markets have existed for thousands of years; capitalism as we now know it, for fewer than 150.

Effective and productive free markets should also provide workers a living wage. If today’s capitalism isn’t the means to that end, it is time to change it.

Obamacare: A Success?

Gallup and Healthways 2015 Q2 survey shows that the uninsured rate among US adults aged 18 and older was 11.4% in the second quarter of 2015, down from 11.9% in the first quarter. The uninsured rate has dropped nearly six percentage points since the fourth quarter of 2013, just before the requirement for Americans to carry health insurance took effect. The latest quarterly uninsured rate is the lowest Gallup and Healthways have recorded since daily tracking of this metric began in 2008. The recent Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell affirmed the legality of subsidies provided to those obtaining insurance through the Affordable Care Act via a federal or state exchange. Here are Gallup’s findings:

So, a byzantine insurance scheme originally designed by the Heritage Foundation as a way to keep the insurance cartel from suffering too much, now looks like a success, if reducing the numbers of the uninsured was the goal. But, once it went into effect, it became collectivism to Republicans, with the label “Obamacare” as if it had sprung fully formed from the mind of a Kenyan Socialist.

Here is a second data point, the use of subsidies by ACA insured by state:

Why Bloomberg thinks Massachusetts is a red state is unexplainable, despite the fact that it has a Republican governor. But, it does serve to lower the red state average a bit. Poor states use more subsidies. Not exactly a surprise:

• These are the states where workers regularly vote against unions, even when it means job losses as in the case of Volkswagen in Tennessee.
• Where else but in a red state could the US manager of the new Mercedes plant be arrested at a traffic stop as a potential illegal immigrant?
• Where else would they fly a rebel flag 150 years after surrender? Many of these same states also get large federal agricultural subsidies, but that is acceptable, because the subsidies mainly go to wealthy individuals and corporations.

But, almost half of Americans still oppose Obamacare. Failure was inevitable, success inconceivable, and therefore failure must have happened.

Now there is an agreement in principle to the Greek debt crisis after all. Here, as explained in terms of Grease the musical, is your cliff notes version of the situation. You will not be disappointed if you watch: