Society – Page 18 – The Wrongologist

Angry Men Now a Political Force

The spin after the SOTU was about how angry voters are, and the political opening that creates, despite the genuine good news on the economy. Here is Mr. Obama from the SOTU:

Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter; that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.

We can’t change the fact that some people are angry, but this article from the Washington Monthly by Andrew Yarrow points to some stunning facts about how men in particular have been left by the wayside of American life:

At least 20% of the nation’s 90 million white men have been pushed to the sidelines, either retreating or storming out of the mainstream of American life. They are not the men you see at work, who play with their children, go out with their wives or partners, are involved in their communities, and earn a living to save for their children’s education and their own retirement. What they do doesn’t register in…the gross domestic product…

Yarrow continues:

We know that they are out there. But they don’t fit old stereotypes of failure, so we’ve had trouble coming to grips with who they are or naming the problem. Parts of their stories have garnered significant attention, but we don’t see that what have been treated as separate problems are closely related.

Here are a few statistics from the article that merit your attention:

• Today, fewer than seven out of ten American men work; in the 1950s, nine out of ten worked.
• Since the 1970s, inflation-adjusted incomes for the bottom 80% of men have fallen, with the most dramatic declines occurring among the bottom 40%, most of whom do not have a college education.
• Today, just half of men are husbands; in 1960, three-fourths of men were married.
• As Barack Obama leaves office, only two out of three children live with their fathers; when John Kennedy was elected President, nine out of ten children lived with their fathers.
• Today, 43% of 18-to-34-year-old American men live with their parents (compared to 36% of millennial women); in 1960, about 28% lived at home.
• There are 36% more women in college than men, whereas in 1970, there were about 35% more men than women in college.
• Men are 50% less likely to trust government than women.
• In recent years, there has been a roughly 20-point gender voting gap, with white men being much more likely not only to vote for Republicans but to express disillusionment and anger toward government; until about 1980, men and women voted roughly evenly for Democrats and Republicans.

The point is that a lot has gone wrong for many white men, a demographic that once was the epitome of privilege and high expectations. And while politicians discuss stagnant wages, broken families and inequality, few notice, much less talk about the probable linkages between these issues and the impact of angry males on our politics.

Some may be thinking that this is a manufactured issue. After all, men still out-earn women, and they still hold most of the CEO and board–level jobs. And none of this white male angst should obscure the continuing struggles of women and people of color, including men of color. African-American and Latino men have had it worse than white men for a very long time.

But we ignore any group’s anger at our peril. The Bundy Brigade’s antics in Utah and Oregon is just one recent example. Many men are mad as hell, and their anger is often turned on scapegoats: Government in the case of the Bundys; Muslims, immigrants, African Americans, and Latinos in the case of others.

In 2016 we are seeing several presidential candidates feeding from the trough of this anger. Playing to the inchoate anger of a sizable minority of white men who have been benched economically, or who simply left the field, is a dangerous demagoguery, one that only benefits the demagogues.

Misinformed vs. Uninformed (Cont.)

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain)

Yesterday, we linked to an article describing the difference between being misinformed and being uninformed. Uninformed people have no information about a subject, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion.

How are so many people getting misinformed, and staying that way? Why does it work?

You probably have never heard of Robert Proctor, from Stanford, who wrote a book about ignorance, in which he tries to answer the question: What keeps ignorance alive, or allows it to be used as a political instrument? He calls this “Agnotology” (the study of ignorance). Proctor’s point is that ignorance has a political geography, and there are things people will work hard to keep you from knowing.

Apparently, his work started with the tobacco industry, who at some point used the slogan: “Doubt is our product“.

Proctor explains that ignorance can be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. For example, the common media approach that there are two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion to readers or viewers. This was how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless. It is still used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.

Procter, from the BBC:

This ‘balance routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’ – creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance…We live in a world of radical ignorance, and the marvel is that any kind of truth cuts through the noise…Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed.

Sound familiar?

In a December focus group with Trump supporters, David Frum, long-time Republican pollster, found that when negative information about Trump was presented, it strengthened the group’s support for him. Participants in the group held on more confidently to their misinformation as the session progressed.

We know that this is a symptom of the culture of American anti-intellectualism. Conspiracy theories have the same clout as legitimate science; the opinions of non-experts are just as credible as those of the experts; and ideology takes precedence over the cold hard facts. In this world, Trump is merely a symptom of that ethos and an industry dedicated to propagating doubt.

We all remember Stephen Colbert saying: “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

And consider a 2012 study that found when people are prompted to use their critical faculties, they become less likely to affirm religious statements. They found that there’s a causal link between “analytical thinking” and religious disbelief.

Perhaps the worst (best?) example was the Republican Party of Texas rejecting critical thinking in its 2012 platform:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs [that] have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.

Hmmm. Teaching HOTS can give you the HOTS? Doubtful.

Perhaps it’s a better thing to not know the facts, instead of knowing a few pretend facts. At least, the uninformed person is persuadable by evidence.

The right-wing noise machine has fed hatred, bigotry, fear and loathing to its base supporters for decades, and Trump is the logical outcome. Most people aren’t all that logical when it comes to politics or political issues, since most of us tend to be ruled more by emotions. But the right-wing propaganda juggernaut has brainwashed some of its followers to the point that they are completely impervious to facts.

The Republicans are not going to laugh the Donald off their stage. They are not going to dissuade his core supporters, the only question is will his supporters vote in the Republican primaries.

If they do turn out, it will be The Donald vs. The Hill in 2016.

Millennials Are Now Largest Voting Bloc

From Bloomberg:

This year, millennials surpassed baby boomers as the largest share of the U.S.’s voting-age population. The US now has 88 million millennials, people born 1981 to 2000…Three of 10 voting-age Americans are millennials, and more members of the generation reach voting age each day.

Bloomberg’s data came from a landline and mobile-phone survey conducted Sept. 18-22 by Selzer & Co., including 402 adults identified as 18 to 35, and 819 other adults. The Bloomberg survey used 1981 as the birth year of the first millennials, as does Pew Research, and they used 2000 as the last birth year for the cohort. While a 15 year-old hasn’t got a whole lot in common with a 34 year-old, you have to break the age continuum somewhere.

And Millennials do not peak in the US population until 2036. So they are going to be in charge of our politics for the next 25 years. Some other facts from the Bloomberg report:

• 47.1% self-identify as “Independents”
• 55.1% voted for a Democrat in the last election
• 52% favor protecting gun rights, saying they are essential for self-defense
• 37.2% favor abortion rights
• 35.8% own a home
• 61% say there should be no cut in benefits for future retirees
• 90% say they don’t expect to receive their full share of benefits when they retire
• But 54.7% think it’s the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care
• 54% of Millennials favor “a bigger government providing more services” compared to 35% of Boomers

Most interesting is this graph of the political issues that are of greatest interest to Millennials:

Bloomberg View I Millennials' Issues

Immigration, ISIS, terrorism and taxes are at the bottom of their list, while jobs, income and healthcare are at the top. In general, the issues they rate as most important have the same relative importance as other age groups, except that Millennials rate the federal deficit higher than the rest.

Millennials are only substantially different from the thinking of other age cohorts when it comes to the Islamic State. Those in the 56+ age group are 2.3 times more likely to think ISIS is an important issue for the US, tying it for first place with jobs and unemployment for those over 56!

The implications for 2016 are enormous. The party that can turn out Millennials may coast to victory. It will be interesting to see which party and candidates are doing the best with that, although this Pew chart from their April 2015 report shows that Democrats start with an advantage:

Pew Millennial Party Affiliation.png

Source: Pew Research Center

And Millennials turn out to vote in higher numbers than previous generations. About half of all eligible people ages 18-29 voted in the 2012 presidential election, roughly the same level as 2008. Compare this with the 1990’s, when youth turnout was regularly less than 40%. In particular, 2012’s high voter turnout showed the power that can accrue to the Millennial generation. From Politico: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Obama easily won the youth vote nationally, 67% to 30%, with young voters proving the decisive difference in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio…Obama won at least 61% of the youth vote in those four states, and if Romney had achieved a 50-50 split, he could have flipped those states…

They can’t be left out of the political conversation.

The party that wins Millennials will be the one that recognizes that this is the generation that built the Uber economy. They’re problem solvers who need to feel engaged.

The party that shows them they’re the party of solving problems and who can promote a series of policies that tie these voters to the traditional base of their party will win.

And maybe create a political majority that can last for a long time.

“One Nation Under God” – A Review

Some readers may have noticed the “Reading List” on the blog’s right frame. Today, we take Kevin Kruse’s “One Nation Under God – How Corporate America Invented Christian America” off that list and discuss it.

The book begins with the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and describes how, through succeeding administrations, Americans came to think that we are a Christian nation instead of a nation of Christians. What started in Eisenhower’s living room ended up in corporate boardrooms, and finds a place at the heart of campaigning in today’s politics.

In 1935, James W. Fifield, a Congregationalist pastor from Los Angeles founded an organization called Spiritual Mobilization. Channeling donations from businessmen like tire magnate Harvey Firestone, Hollywood producer Cecil B. De Mille, Sun Oil’s J. Howard Pew, and the National Association of Manufacturers, Fifield built a nation-wide publishing and propaganda campaign that called ministers to action, saying:

Every Christian should oppose the totalitarian trends of the New Deal…

And to oppose:

The anti-Christian and anti-American trends toward pagan stateism in America.

This was conflated with slogans promoting: “free pulpit, free speech, free enterprise, free press, and free assembly.”

The Spiritual Mobilization campaign’s thesis was that if religiosity could be widely and officially deployed, it would be the sword that defeated both collectivist liberals and Communists who, in their view, were both working to undermine America.

Some context: The percentage of Americans who claimed membership in a church was low in the 19th century. Kruse shows that it increased from 16% in 1850 to 36% in 1900. It rose to 49% by 1940. It peaked in 1959 at 69%. Along the way, we adopted “Under God” and “In God We Trust” with little opposition from organizations like the ACLU. Much of what Kruse tells us is about familiar events:

• The addition of “Under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954
• The official adoption of “In God We Trust” on all American currency in the late 1950s
• The Supreme Court decisions that struck down state-mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools in the early 1960s, and the huge polarization it brought among individual Christians vs. their Church leaders, mostly abetted by politicians who saw a campaign issue

Overall, the book is an excellent analysis of how Christian fundamentalism and capitalism were conflated in the 1950s to erode the divide between church and state, re-casting progressive political philosophy as both “un-American”, and “anti-Christian” at the same time. Importantly, he describes the thinking that emerged from Fifield’s movement and its subsequent embrace by Billy Graham; that our way of life and our economic system were ordained not just by God, but by the Christian God.

Graham said during the 1952 presidential campaign:

The Christian people of America will not sit idly by…They are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters.

Graham meant Eisenhower. Kruse details the incestuous relationship between clergymen and politicians, with particular focus on Rev. Billy Graham’s remarkable ability to get close to, and influence, presidents.

Some have criticized the book, saying it does not prove its case about the influence of corporate America in the promotion of “One Nation Under God”. Wrongo disagrees. Most of the funding for these efforts, which began in the 1930s and continued through the Nixon administration in the 1970s were contributed by corporations and corporate executives. In fact, the book’s main premise is that corporatists are as responsible as politicians and clergy for making America a more Christian nation.

We continue to see the impact of these corporate/clergy efforts today: It bolsters the idea of American Exceptionalism, it limits the range of acceptable political debate, it fosters class warfare, and suborns churches to the cause of politics.

Today’s religious fundamentalists want to blur the lines between church and state. They seek to control American culture, to use faith in the service of ideals that leave no room for social programs, no room for diversity, no room for science, no room for ideas that contradict or challenge the myth of America as a Christian-capitalist-ordained-by-God empire.

This movement that started in the 1930s explains why many Americans favor policies that are clearly against their best interests. Not coincidentally, many of those in that category are also “religious conservatives.” A recent interview with a rural Kentuckian who voted for Republican Governor Matt Bevin who plans to roll back Medicaid expansion, despite her need for insurance, said:

My religious beliefs outweigh whether or not I have insurance…

She voted for an anti-abortion, anti-gay rights candidate, despite her personal need for insurance.

Kruse’s book explains why.

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – Moar Terror, Moar Gunz Edition

The argument has already started: “They were Arabs, and no amount of gun control would have stopped them.” The OMG, they were Muslim Terrorists (!!) yelp obscures two problems: America has 300+ million guns in the hands of 320 million citizens. We’ve allowed guns to become ubiquitous. Second, the vast majority of American deaths from guns do not involve Muslims. The NYT reports that there’s been a mass shooting of four or more people in America every day in 2015. Including San Bernardino, a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks this year. Republicans tell us that this is the cost to water the Tree of Liberty.

Wrongo has no problem with gun ownership. If people wish to own guns for hunting or self-defense, fine. If people hunt for food, fine. If they hunt for sport, they should examine their consciences, to see if they can find one.

But no one needs dozens, much less scores of guns. No one needs semi-automatic, or worse, automatic weapons, other than to kill lots of their fellow citizens. You can defend your house nicely with a pump-action shotgun with ‘00 buckshot. You don’t need a 30-round magazine and a semi-automatic AR or AK rifle. The legitimate reasons to have a gun are:

• You are a cop
• You are registered in an organized, regulated militia
• You hunt for food
• You feel the need for home protection.

These purposes can be accommodated within a framework of reasonable laws. But unlike freedom of speech, or assembly, or religion, where most people see rational limits for other Constitutional rights such as: you can’t threaten a person’s life and claim a 1st Amendment privilege, or form a lynch mob. But, when it comes to the 2nd Amendment, people make the most extreme demands for freedom to own any weapon.

We cannot stop terrorist attacks on our soil. Despite our federal surveillance and the training of local police, more attacks are coming. It only takes a few people to pull off such attacks, weapons are easy to obtain in the US, and the materials to make explosives are everywhere.

We will see more virulent Islamophobia, and more restriction of immigration. What we won’t see is more restrictions on who/how many guns people can own, despite the fact that we could make it more difficult for those who want to commit these atrocities.

One shooting victim we’d like to see:

In other news, it’s beginning to look a lot like Trump:

New poll has The Donald at 36% among Republicans:

The Zuckerberg donation: A good thing, or a PR thing?

Democrats: Where the White Voters At?

Yesterday, we examined the fact that the poorest Americans are the least likely to vote, so they cede the policy agenda to those who do support the weakening of America’s social safety net, and who use low voter turnout as a key election strategy.

Do the Democrats have a strategy to counter the election strategy of the GOP? If they do it isn’t evident.

Dems think that they have a permanent Electoral College presidential majority, and that changing American demographics will help them build majorities in both houses of Congress by the mid-2040’s. They are apparently willing to wait for demographics to become destiny: The numbers of white working-class voters will dip to just 30% of all voters by 2020 and 44% of white voters.

This is a dramatic decline from 1988, when white working-class voters were 54% of all voters and 64% of white voters.

But, in the last three presidential elections, the Democratic candidate lost among white working-class (non-college) voters by an average of 22 points, and by 26 points in 2012 (62%-36%). Despite Mr. Obama winning two terms, his “Obama coalition” will not insure a Democratic majority in Congress, or even provide with certainty the election of a Democratic president again in 2016.

In fact, PPP, a Democrat-leaning polling firm with a great record for accuracy, says this about 2016:

Early general election contests are shaping up to be very competitive with Hillary Clinton polling within 2 points of 5 out of 6 Republicans that we tested against her. The only GOP hopeful to actually lead Clinton is Marco Rubio at 45/43. Rubio is also the only candidate in the field with a positive favorability rating among the overall electorate, at 39/37.

Pew found that those who are most unlikely to vote are demographically distinct from likely voters:

• 34% of nonvoters are younger than 30 years old
• 43% of nonvoters are Hispanic, African American, or other racial and ethnic minorities
• 46% of nonvoters have family incomes less than $30,000 per year, while only 19% of likely voters are from low-income families
• 72% of likely voters have completed at least some college, while 54% of non-voters did not attend college

On the subject of the white working class voter, The Democratic Strategist produced an analysis about the subject, “Roundtable on Progressives and the White Working Class”, which asked the question: “What do you think is the most important single step progressives and Democrats can take to regain support among white working class Americans?”

One thing stood out in their deliberations: It was clear from surveys that white working-class voters support public action to address chronic joblessness, income disparities, and unequal education and social opportunities. They cited the study on the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty conducted by the Center for American Progress, which found that more than two-thirds of white non-college voters supported 11 out of 11 policies to fight poverty, including:

• An increase in the minimum wage
• Subsidized child care
• Expanded Earned Income Tax Credit
• A national jobs program to combat unemployment

Support among this cohort topped 80% for universal pre-k, expanded Pell grants for low-income families, and affordable child care, and was basically on par with the views of African Americans and Latinos.

That indicates that there is a path for Democrats to gain a larger share of white working class voters, but The Democratic establishment does not have a serious plan that shows white non-college voters that they see the real problems facing Americans the same way.

Here is a modest program to improve Democrats’ chances with white working class voters:

1. The old guard Democratic leaders must go: Why would any Democratic candidate want to brand themselves with a party leadership that tells them to run content-free campaigns?
2. They should look at the political landscape: People are discontented, in part, because incomes haven’t risen in 15 years. What have Democrats done in response? Virtually nothing.
3. Democratic politicians need to listen to constituents. Democrats will never appeal to the majority of working Americans by primarily making more promises to enact new civil rights rules, or environmental laws. They have to deal with incomes.

The economic struggles of the white working class, combined with a feeling of powerlessness, have undoubtedly made them susceptible to right-wing rhetoric, a major coup for Republicans. The key to Democrats winning over this demographic is more about calls for straightforward job creation, wage increases, and benefits for working-aged families, and less about ploys that superficially connect to them.

We should remember that “low income white” is not a synonym for “Republican.”

Monday Wake Up Call – November 23, 2015

Earlier in the month, the Wrongologist wrote a column asking: “Shouldn’t Democrats Be Doing Better?” Over the last few days, we have seen others ask the same question. Notably, Alec MacGillis asked “Who Turned My Blue State Red?” in Sunday’s NYT.

He pondered why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net, and mentioned two major points: That the “have-littles” have no interest in helping the “have-nothings”, and that the “have-nothings” rarely vote.

MacGillis quotes State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year:

People on Medicaid don’t vote.

The numbers show that the bottom 20% in socioeconomic status aren’t voting for anyone, while the next quintile wages a class war aimed at their inferiors. The poorest aren’t voting to shred their own safety net, they’re not voting at all. They have been demobilized, and the middle and upper classes are taking advantage of low turnout to drive their political programs:

• Maine re-elected a guy who ran on a platform of not helping the poor
• Kentucky voted in a governor who will dismantle Obamacare
• Kansas re-elected a guy who has nearly tanked their economy, and got elected after promising to hurt them some more

Democrats were counting on Obamacare to galvanize the bottom quintile of the population in red states to vote for them by 2016, but it isn’t happening. One issue that MacGillis does not address is how the politics of resentment is fanned and fostered, mainly by right wing propaganda. Otherwise, why are people a few steps up from the bottom blaming the poor rather than blaming the rich, when it is the rich who have gamed the system, not the poor?

The answer is that they are victims of welfare queen paranoia.

Their perceptions have been manipulated over the past 30 years by a steady diet of social Darwinism, led by the GOP, the Club for Growth, Fox News, and others. But Democrats and progressives have failed to develop ANY effective counter that gives people a reason to vote, or to vote their economic interests.

And this may be a good time to point out that the arguments that helping the poor disincents them have little empirical foundation:

For as long as there have been government programs designed to help the poor, there have been critics insisting that helping the poor will keep them from working. But the evidence for this proposition has always been rather weak.

And a recent study from MIT and Harvard economists makes the case even weaker. Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Benjamin Olken reanalyzed data from seven randomized experiments evaluating cash programs in poor countries and found “no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work.” Attacking welfare recipients as lazy is easy rhetoric, but when you actually test the proposition scientifically, it doesn’t hold up.

We know that most people form their opinions about whole groups of people (such as people living under the poverty line) from their anecdotal experience. They do not develop an understanding of the policies, or the statistics that describe the outcomes of specific policies.

Thus, well-known facts such as increasing the minimum wage doesn’t decrease jobs, and that Obamacare has not decreased jobs, are unknown to them.

There is no such thing as a well informed electorate, at least not in the US.

So, time to wake up American voters! To help you get the sleep out of your eyes, here is “The Times They are a-Changing” the great Dylan song interpreted by Flogging Molly, an American Celtic punk band from Los Angeles, led by Irish vocalist Dave King.

They add a sense of energy, hope and joy to Dylan’s old classic. Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

They Call It “Class Warfare” For a Reason

Many pundits have commented on research by Angus Deaton and Anne Case of Princeton (h/t: Naked Capitalism for an ungated copy of the report) showing that mortality rates for middle-aged white Americans have risen since 1999, in contrast to the patterns for every other racial group and for residents of virtually every other affluent country. Here is a comparison of mortality rates among developed countries, with the US middle-aged white population:

“USW” above stands for US non-Hispanic Whites, while “USH” is US Hispanics, both are census descriptions. Deaton and Case found that rising substance abuse, including alcohol-related disease and painkiller overdose, was the main cause of the disturbing trend:

“Poisonings” refers to drugs and opioids. White Americans are killing themselves directly or indirectly, in increasing numbers. Suicide is up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking causes. This has happened before, in Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it in America.

Why this has happened with few noticing until now, is a great question. There have been warning signs of distress, such as the fact that US life expectancy has stopped rising, and that death rates among white women had risen (and over the same time period examined in the Deaton-Case study). USA Today reported in 2008 that the problem highlighted by Deaton and Case already was already flowering in the Deep South and Appalachia. Citing a study by the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Washington, they found that:

4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either declines or stagnation in their life expectancy in the ’80s and ’90s.

Krugman in Monday’s NYT called it “Despair, American Style“, but like others, did not offer a complte explanation of the phenomena. Deeper analysis is necessary. It would be helpful to see the data mapped. An educated guess is that it is correlated with states that made up the old Confederacy and the American rust belt, as the 2008 Harvard study found.

For example, a 2013 report by the Trust for America’s Health (TFAH) identified West Virginia as leading the nation in drug overdose deaths, with a rate of 28.9 per 100,000 residents. The state’s fatal overdose rate increased by 605% between 1999 and 2010, and has jumped 1,056% since 1979. The majority of these deaths are attributable to the abuse of addictive prescription painkillers.

Assuming that Krugman is correct and it is related to despair, maybe we should look at whether this cohort possesses the things necessary to make life worthwhile, including food security, and a decent place to live, a way to be a part of a larger community, a sense of self-worth. If you’ve lived long enough to see people break, and then try to figure out why they did, while others did not, a lot of it is whether they were part of a supportive community, or an indifferent/cruel environment.

Job and income insecurity causes stress, and stress is a killer. Over an extended period of time, the physical effects of stress can result in long term adverse effects to health, including contributing to chronic pain and depression. Some manage to find relief by opting to buy weed online, but others struggle to get a hold of these products due to local legislation and turn to their doctors for other methods. Some may even find themselves using cambodian mushrooms to help manage their anxiety and stress before turning to any doctor’s orders.

But our physicians are also at fault. Here is a CDC article that says that the amount of pain Americans report has not increased, while the prescribing of pain meds has quadrupled since 1999. Deaton and Case also point out that opioids are prescribed far more often here to treat maladies that include pain than in other countries.

This didn’t happen yesterday, and it won’t be cured by exhortations to “eat healthy,” or “do yoga,” or to follow the great American mantra: “study hard”. To end despair in the working class, we need a better program:

(a) Supportive communities that end stigmatizing of low income earners
(b) Universal health care
(c) A jobs guarantee, with a living minimum wage, so people have better options than the Dollar Store or fast food
(d) Free college, so parents believe that their kids have a shot at a better life

Job and income insecurity are insidious. When you spend a few years out of work, despair creeps in. Despair will push you to the fringes of society, and then, society will blame you for being there.

A redesign of our capitalism is the answer.

Does any presidential candidate support this?

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – November 8, 2015

Another interesting week. Here at the Mansion of Wrong, most leaves are on the ground, except for the Oak trees. Squirrels are very busy with this year’s bumper crop of acorns. In politics, Jeb and Ben looked, but couldn’t find any acorns. Mr. Obama said “Yes” to troops in Syria and “No” to the Keystone pipeline.

Not a great week for Republican candidates. Jeb can’t escape the family legacy:

Dr. Carson fumbled science, including why we have Pyramids:

Tuesday’s elections followed a tried and true script:

Mr. Obama pushed the pram into Syria:

But, we have no “boots on the ground”:

A study revealed that middle-aged whites are dying more quickly in the US:

Monday Wake Up Call – November 2, 2015

From the WaPo:

Keith Moore, a 40-year-old military veteran recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder in Oklahoma, remembers the day last year when he sold off a chunk of his pension.

He had left the military after 21 years of service, because his disabilities — PTSD, arthritis and other injuries — made it difficult to work. But the transition to civilian life came with a different struggle: the need to provide for his family and pay the same bills with only half the paycheck.

The article says that Moore was two months behind on rent and 10 days from his next paycheck. He saw a TV ad for Future Income Payments, an Irvine, CA company that buys pensions in exchange for a lump sum of cash. The company said it had worked with military personnel and government workers. Moore called them. More from WaPo: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The next day, a company representative…explained that he [Moore] would receive a $5,000 cash advance for selling part of his pension. In exchange, Moore would have to pay the company $510 a month for five years, a total of $30,600.

If it were a typical loan, that would amount to $25,600 in interest — a rate of 512%.

Can you say deceptive and predatory?

We are ending year seven of our recovery from the Great Recession, but the recovery has largely benefited those at the top of the income ladder, while bottom-feeders like these pension advance companies work to profit from poverty, charging more than 500% annual interest.

This is particularly egregious when companies target income streams that are riskless since they are backed by the federal government.

But these are not treated as loans by the pension advance companies. They are treated as an installment “sale”. The pensioner sells the income stream to the pension advance firm, rather than making a loan against the future payments, which would be subject to usury laws.

Some will say that Mr. Moore entered into a dumb deal, that he is a victim of his own personal choices.

Others could say that view makes you an apologist for loan sharking. Following the argument to its logical conclusion, any fraud or con game should be legal under the premise, “the victim should have known better“.

Some in the government are looking into the grift: In a 2014 report, the GAO identified 38 companies that offered pension advances. At least 30 of them were affiliated with one another in some way. The Senate Special Committee on Aging held a hearing on the issue last month, and reported that only two states, Missouri and Vermont; have laws regulating pension advance companies. If 30 operators are really one company, why can’t states or the Feds regulate this?

So, it’s past time for state and federal regulators to wake up and look carefully at pension advance firms. To help them rub the sleep from their eyes, here is Minus the Bear, an American indie rock band from Seattle, with their tune “Knights”:

Sample Lyrics:
I owe you, don’t I?
A little light today but tomorrow
Oh, tomorrow

This usury’s so typical
A piece of you for a piece of me
It’s hard-coded
A piece of you for a piece of me

Is it really a sin if we both come out even?

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The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Society