The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Americans
are becoming a mistrustful bunch. Nearly 2/3 of us say you can’t be too careful
in dealing with people, according to the Chicago-based General
Social Survey, (GSS), a massive survey of Americans conducted regularly
since 1972, with funding from the National Science Foundation. The GSS has been
asking whether most people can be trusted, or whether “you can’t be too
careful” in daily life. Four decades ago, Americans were evenly split on the
question. But, here are the current findings:

• 78% have little faith in people
  they meet while traveling, saying they trust them “just
  somewhat,” “not too much” or “not at all”, while 19%
  don’t worry, they have “quite a bit” or “a great deal”
  of trust in people away from home
• 75% mistrust people driving
  cars while they’re driving, biking or walking
• 67% have little confidence in
  people who swipe their credit card when they buy something
• 59% don’t have much faith in
  people with whom they have shared photos, videos or information on social
  media
• 55% don’t trust the people they
  hire to come into their homes to do work
• 50% have little trust in the
  people who prepare their food when they eat out

Yet, 100% of them continue to eat
out? Asked
by the GSS how much of the time they trust the government in Washington to do
what is right, people say:

• 81%: only some of the time
• 15%: most of the time
• 2%: just about always

The GSS poll
was conducted Oct. 3-7, 2013. It involved online interviews with 1,227 adults.
The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage
points for all respondents.

Pew
Research Center show similar results, with just 19% trusting the government
most of the time. Pew has a slick, interactive longitudinal
survey that has tracked the public’s trust in government since 1958. Check
it out at the link above.  

A 107-country
poll by Transparency
International, a corruption monitor, this past summer found Americans more
likely than Italians to say that they feel that their police, business and media
are all “corrupt or extremely corrupt”. But, according to the Economist,
that is an ill-informed conclusion:

In
genuinely low-trust countries, tax evasion comes naturally: when those at the
top cheat, only dupes follow the rules. But, according to the Economist, America
shows few signs of surging tax evasion:

Yet Americans
are increasingly distrustful and angry. But even though the Transparency
International survey shows we distrust authority at Italian levels, they do not
completely describe reality. Most surveys show that “half of all Americans” think
this or that, but behind the headlines, the data show partisan or demographic
divides.

Behind the
GSS numbers about overall trust between Americans, there are some large gaps: The
bulk of the recent decline involves whites becoming less trusting. And we know
that over the same period, (since the early 1970’s), society has become more
impersonal and more economically unequal.

Robert Putnam of
Harvard University, a pioneer in the study of “social capital”, argues
that Americans’ trust in one another has been declining steadily since the  end of the WWII, when civic activity and a
sense of community among neighbors were at a peak.

Putnam makes a
distinction between two kinds of social capital: bonding capital and bridging
capital. Bonding occurs when you are
socializing with people who are like you. But in order to create
peaceful societies in a diverse multi-ethnic country, you also need to have bridging
capital: Bridging is what you do when
you make friends with people who are not like you. Putnam argues that
those two kinds of social capital, bonding and bridging, strengthen each other.
Consequently, with the decline of the bonding capital, inevitably comes the decline
of bridging capital, and thus, lower societal trust.

And
thus, the growth in anti-government cynicism that is America’s real product of
distrust. Also, our capitalism-based society relies on risk, individuals,
competition, and pitting people (and groups) against one another for a limited
number of dollars and other resources. That also contributes to reduced trust
in a society. We see one another as competitors, rather than allies for
resources.With low GDP growth, America is becoming a zero-sum game economy.

Sharply-delineated
voter blocs are alarmingly willing to believe that rival groups are up to no
good or are taking more than their fair share. That tallies with one of the
biggest changes over the past 15 years: a
collapse in support among conservatives for government safety nets.

Here is a
good example that proves the point:

Who said
that? George
W. Bush, in his weekly radio address on December 15, 2002. Can you imagine a conservative delivering that message in 2013?

To succeed, a pluralist democracy must find
compromises between a wide range of views. In DC today, compromise is often
portrayed as giving up your principles and therefore a form of corruption,
instead of a necessity that allows society to function.

It comes down to respecting another’s
point of view even if you don’t trust them.

What’s
Wrong Today:

The
widening gap between rich and poor is eroding faith in the American dream.

By almost
two to one ― 64% to 33% ― Americans say the US no longer offers everyone an
equal chance to get ahead, according to a poll by Bloomberg. The survey of
1,004 adults was conducted by Selzer & Co., an Iowa-based
pollster from December 6-9. The poll was taken just after the statements by President
Obama and Pope Francis, who both expressed alarm about growing income
inequality.

By way of
background, the richest 10% of Americans earned more than half of all US
income last year, the largest share since 1917, according to Emmanuel
Saez,
economist at the University of California at Berkeley. From Bloomberg:

In the poll,
68% of Americans say the income gap is growing, while 18% say it is unchanged
and 10% say it’s shrinking. It is amazing that FACTS just don’t seem to matter to the 28% who say that
inequality isn’t growing! More from Bloomberg: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

So, if you
are doing ok, you think “the market” is the answer, and if you make less than
$50k, you are looking for some help. Is inequality simply another way to talk
about class warfare and income redistribution as Republicans complain?

The Market
is not going to re-animate our middle class. It is six years since the start of the Great Recession, and it hasn’t happened yet. An unfettered business environment
will not produce wage growth. Nor will trickle-down. Even Adam Smith realized
the limitations of just letting businessmen do what they pleased. While he is
often quoted by conservatives, who wrongly assign a God-like virtue to the
“invisible hand” of the market, he also had this to say:

From Tomdispatch.com:

In 2011,
when Mr. Obama proposed a “millionaire’s tax”, he
was accused by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) of heading down the “class
warfare path.” 
In 2012, Mitt Romney blasted the president for encouraging “class warfare” by attacking entrepreneurial
success.

Tomdispatch
goes on to describe how usage of class warfare was co-opted recently by the 1%,
saying that for
at least a century, it was a commonplace in the American lexicon that:

MSNBC’s Tim Noah:

But focus
on the epithet class warfare
distracts us from the true issues of inequality: Equality should be about equal
opportunities in education, employment, housing, health care, safe living
environment, secure pensions – these are the basic principles of equality.

However, the
greatest transfer of wealth in history continues, and no one in Washington can,
or will, do anything about it. We have been living under an oligarchy since
St. Ronnie introduced the country to “Reaganomics”.
Since financial wealth is what counts as far as the control of income-producing
assets, we can say that just 10% of the people own the United States of
America.

The poor have
just three ways to band together and act to protect their interests:

#1. Government
#2. Unions
#3. Civil Disobedience

In the
early 21st Century, the first two options have been taken out of the
equation. That leaves #3. That’s the one the oligarchs want the poor to try, since
they expect the police will save their skins when the time comes. That is why the police have been
militarized, because that’s the option the plutocrats think they can
simply slap down. (Think about Occupy)

We have
all seen the hardware the police are stockpiling. It must be the real reason
for militarizing our police departments.

As long as
the 10% who sit on most of the assets don’t give a damn about their fellow
Americans dying of hunger, disease, destroyed living environments and crumbling
infrastructure, America does not have a chance of becoming a nation worthy of “All
men are created equal” in our Declaration of
Independence.

And as long as those
in Congress stay busy managing their careers instead
of shouldering their part of the responsibility to secure a humanely just society, we will never achieve the American dream.

“The
American Dream: You have to be asleep to believe it.” -George Carlin

Time Magazine announced that it will name its Person of the Year (POY) tomorrow. It
offered 10 finalists who had the most influence on the news in 2013.
Their list includes: Bashar Assad, Jeff Bezos, Ted Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Pope
Francis, Barack Obama, Hassan Rouhani, Kathleen Sebelius, Edward Snowden, and Edith
Windsor, a gay rights activist.

Of course,
Time has also named Hitler and Stalin
(twice) as POY in the distant past, while, in 2002, it named
Whistleblowers,
including Coleen Rowley, an FBI agent who revealed mishandling of information about
the 9/11 attacks by the FBI.

The Wrongologist salutes another
whistleblower, Edward Snowden as Person of the Year. Snowden leaked an
estimated 200,000 files that exposed the extensive and intrusive phone and Internet
surveillance and intelligence gathering by the US, principally by the National
Security Agency (NSA). In his nomination, the Wrongologist joins The Guardian, who yesterday named Snowden their POY for
2013. They had named Chelsea Manning as POY in 2012, making it a 2-year run for
whistleblowers by The Guardian. From
their article:

We should
note that the Snowden affair was also a bonanza for The Guardian, since Snowden gave the data that he copied from US
government computers to their reporter, Glenn Greenwald. Last week, Alan
Rusbridger, the Guardian’s
editor, said that his paper has published only 1% of the
files that it received from Snowden.

By Snowden
downloading thousands of files from the NSA’s computers and handing them over
to journalists, we have seen a torrent of news stories about the NSA’s
surveillance activities. The Guardian and the WaPo published a
series of articles beginning last May, and the flow of documents continues.
Just last week, we learned that the agency is tracking hundreds of
millions of cell phones, gathering nearly five billion records a day. (See an
interactive timeline of the Snowden revelations here.)

Snowden has
opened the eyes of people around the world to how easy it is for governments to
monitor digital communications, and how complicit major technology companies
have been in these surveillance programs.

He has sparked a debate about how to
preserve privacy in the information age—and whether such a thing is even
possible. If Snowden hadn’t come forward, the steady encroachment of the
surveillance state would have continued, and most people might never have known
about the effort. Since Snowden shined a light on Big Brother and his enablers,
some of them may be forced to be more circumspect in their actions. On Monday, the
CEOs of AOL, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and
Yahoo—published an
open letter
in which they said:

OK, but without
Snowden’s intervention, would the likes of Google’s Larry Page and Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg have signed a letter asking that the government rein in its stealth
data gathering? Previously, these companies had been helping the NSA, but since
Snowden blew the lid off the whole enterprise, they now have decided to try to do
something about it.

It was the same story for the Obama
Administration,
which before Snowden’s disclosures, had been issuing false statements about
what the NSA wasn’t doing. James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National
Intelligence (DNI), said that it wasn’t
true that
the NSA collected data on hundreds of millions of Americans, while General
Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, denied at least fourteen
times
that the Agency intercepted any American’s e-mails, texts, and other electronic
communications. Both claims were false.

Disclosing
this secret information transformed Snowden’s life. He now lives in Moscow,
unable to leave Russia for fear of arrest. Without political asylum, he faces extradition
to the US and a prosecution that threatens a long jail sentence, if Chelsea Manning’s
term of 35 years is any yardstick. Snowden seems to have anticipated this. In an
interview
with Greenwald, he said: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

He has
forsaken his future and his liberty for the sake of democratic values,
transparency, and freedom.

The
official argument against Snowden is that his disclosures actually make it more
likely that the next terrorist attack succeeds. Responsible members of our
intelligence establishment have testified that terrorists are more able to
evade detection because they have learned, via Snowden, some of our “sources
and methods”. Most of their testimony is vague. And few specific
instances are cited in which Snowden’s information was harmful.

And
it all begs the central question of whether heroic efforts to minimize the risk of terrorist attack at home,
which comes with the steady erosion of individual rights, is worth the cost to
the American people. 

Our
government, probably with good intentions, has directed an unprecedented
expansion of the surveillance state, bending America’s laws and violating some
of our most deeply held values. Even after all of Snowden’s revelations, there is no assurance that anything
meaningful will be done by the Obama Administration to protect the zone
of privacy in which all (or most) of us believe we have the right to live. Here
is a brief reminder of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution.
Please reread it and tell us who deserves to be in prison:

That
most Americans sit silently by and allow this to continue at the cost of their personal
liberty and ultimately, of that of their children as well, is a disgrace.

Naming
Snowden as POY won’t, by itself, change what happens in Washington and other
capitals. Particularly if it is only the Wrongologist and The Guardian that give him the honor.

Being
named Time’s POY would send a
message that the main stream American media recognize the contribution he has
made, and the importance of the issues he has raised.

What’s Wrong Today:

Last Friday, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
(CBPP) released a series of charts that
document the course of the economy since the 2008 recession. It is well worth
your time. Here is the chart that shows the number of unemployed people per job
opening in the US in September 2013:

From the CBPP:
(emphasis by the Wrongologist)

So, it should be no surprise that we
have 4 million long term unemployed in America today, a number not seen since
we started keeping records in the late 1940’s. The number was only 1 million in
2007. From the St. Louis Federal Reserve:

Today, Paul
Krugman is concerned about the loss of unemployment benefits for 1.3
million Americans just before Christmas, which he says is based on bad Republican
ideology, buttressed by bad economics. He writes:

He goes on
to say that Republicans think that unemployment insurance reduces the incentive
to search for a new job. As a result, the story goes, workers stay unemployed
longer. Republicans claim that the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program,
which lets workers collect benefits beyond the usual limit of 26 weeks,
explains why there are so many long-term unemployed workers in America today. So
the GOP answer is to increase their pain by cutting their benefits: If we eliminate
their incentive to sit at home, they will get jobs.

But, with
3 times as many long-term unemployed as there are jobs, Republicans must be
expecting another Christmas miracle.

Krugman
continues:

Your Republican grandfather probably
told you that the PROVEN model for personal success is:

#1. Stay in school

#2. Start at the bottom and continue to
learn, starting over when bad things happen, as they often do

#3. Save a piece of every pay check…etc,
etc.

Of course, grandpa didn’t tell
you what to do when #2 becomes:  “what you do if you can’t get a job”, or when it becomes: “what you do if you DO get a job
but the pay doesn’t cover your expenses”…etc, etc.

He should have added the rule: “Be
lucky enough not to start at the bottom”.

David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, has a longish article up at The
Guardian where he describes what he calls our “Two Americas” and the challenge presented
by what Krugman called “the perfect marriage of callousness”, the complete lack
of empathy combined with bad economics:

Shorter: Unchecked capitalism has created a fractured society. Here
are a few things that the “marriage of callousness” has delivered:

• From
  1947 to 1979, the middle class received 54% of the nation’s total income, and the
  economy grew at 3.7% per year

• From
  1980 to 2010, when the middle class’s share of the nation’s total income fell
  to 46%, and annual GDP growth fell to 2.7%

• If
  the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it would be $10.74 today

• The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the country’s wealth while the
  bottom 80% owns less than 5%

• In
  the past 50 years, the tax rates of the 400 richest families in America have fallen
  by 60%

• The
  wealthiest among us have taken control of election finance: 28%
  of all campaign donations came from the wealthiest 0.01%

David
Simon’s article closes with: (emphasis by the Wrongologist

The enemy
that created the two Americas and the marriage of callousness is the corruption of
the political system and the corruption of individuals who work within that system.

We need to
take the money out of politics. We need total transparency about donations from
lobbyists and corporations. We need to limit the amount that can be spent on
elections. The next presidential race will certainly set another spending
record; many Senate races will set spending records in 2014.

If you
want your democracy back, then it’s time to have a re-think regarding what a
political system that works for everyone should look like. We need to come up
with a system that limits the ability of the rich and powerful to buy the
political process and system of government.

John F.
Kennedy, in a 1962 speech
to the Alliance For Progress, said:

If our
political process continues without dealing with unchecked capitalism, this is surely
what we will face.

News this week was dominated by
the death of Nelson Mandela. Alan
Paton, a South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist, wrote the book,
Cry,
the Beloved Country in 1948. It is set
in Johannesburg and in rural South Africa. It is a poetic description of family
breakup, murder and redemption. Most important, it describes its principal
character’s love for his people, the inherent goodness in all people, and his
love for his country, despite how it has hurt his people. Paton died before Mandela was released from jail
in 1990, but this quote by Paton seems to sum up Mandela’s life beautifully:  

Use it to write your homily for
today.

David Horsey’s remembrance incorporates
Mandela’s quote that is on the wall of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg:

Mandela was not a saint. He was an angry young man with a malleable philosophy that ranged from Methodism to Marxism. After his release from prison, he even agreed that his enemies were correct to call him a terrorist. What turned him into a great man with a legacy comparable to that of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, was his turn away from hate and towards forgiveness. Mandela was a man like any other except for his capacity to open his heart, even to his enemies. He also said:

Mandela never ceased being a revolutionary. He remained a socialist; he was an admirer of Fidel Castro. The man now being praised by the likes of Ted Cruz and George W. Bush was denounced by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who felt he was a communist. Mandela learned a key lesson that most revolutionaries, politicians and world leaders never learn: Before you can change the world, you must change yourself.

In other news, Jeff Bezos, Amazon revolutionary, announced a drone delivery system:

The 113th Congress only works for another 7 days. Give thanks for your present:

The Detroit bankruptcy will be the XMAS gift that keeps on giving:

Regarding Inequality, What Would Jesus Do?

The Inequality debate continues:

Yesterday
the world bid goodbye to Nelson Mandela. Readers of the Wrongologist Blog may
remember that he and Ms. Oh So Right visited South Africa in 2012. You can read
about the visit to Soweto here.

Nelson
Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi were the three great moral
icons of the 20th Century. All were reviled in their own time by the
domestic power structure in their home lands, each inspired people all over the
world. Each appealed to the best in the rest of us; that is what made them
transcendent global figures.

Mandela,
like the others, fought the institutions of racism and/or colonialism. Their emphasis
on love and forgiveness made it easier for each to form alliances with sympathetic whites
within their country’s power structure.

Beyond
simply inspiring their people, each won a great victory in their countries.

Of the three, Mandela
suffered the most personal hardship. Much of his moral authority came from the
decades he spent as a prisoner. He was the only one to hold public office and
the only one to die a natural death.

We
visited Mandela House in Soweto. The Mandela House is located at 8115 Orlando
West, on the corner of Vilakazi and Ngakane Streets. Vilakazi Street is the best known street in Soweto. It is
the only street in the world where two Nobel Peace Prize winners have lived:
Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Mandela lived at #8115 and Tutu about 50 yards
down the street. Mandela’s home is now a museum, where Ms. Oh So Right took this photo of the Mandela
bedroom:

In
his book, The Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela wrote the following
after his return to his home in Soweto after his release from 27 years in prison
in 1990:

The
house was built in 1945, part of a Johannesburg initiative to build new houses in Orlando.
Mandela moved into the house in 1946. Winnie, his second wife, moved into the
house in 1958. She lived in the house with her daughters while Nelson Mandela
was in jail, until she was exiled to Brandfort by the government in 1977, where
she remained under house arrest until 1986 before returning to Soweto.

Mandela
lived in the house for only 11 days after his release from prison in 1990, the
family, however, continued to occupy the house until 1996.

More
from Mandela:

There
is a high-end shopping mall in Sandton, which is an upscale part of
Johannesburg. It is packed with shoppers of all races.

In
the “Nelson Mandela Square” in the center of the Mall, there is a
larger-than-life statue of Mandela.

The
Wrongologist had a coffee at an outdoor café, the Caffe Della Salute, and
watched locals, of all races, stop to take a family photo at Mandela’s feet. All
smiled and hugged their family members.

It
is striking to think that on the Mall in Washington DC, the Statue of Martin
Luther King, Jr. also depicts a larger-than-life representation of our
non-violent revolutionary, and Americans of all races also snap a photo at the
feet of our great man.

Starting
in 1972, the US House of Representatives tried to pass legislation to create
economic sanctions against South Africa until Apartheid was ended and Mandela
released. It was only taken up in 1985, and then passed in 1986 as The
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986. The Congress had to override
President Reagan’s veto of the bill, and a Republican-led Senate did just that.
Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was one of those who voted to override, while Dick
Cheney voted against the House resolution.

The
sanctions were repealed in July 1991 after South Africa met the preconditions
of the act.

How
quickly we forget that Mandela was thought to be a terrorist well into the 1980’s
by many. Margret Thatcher had called the African National Congress
(ANC), Mandela’s party, a “typical terrorist organization”.

William
F. Buckley in 1990 on the release of Mandela:

(Finland Station is a
train station in Saint Petersburg, Russia handling transportation to destinations including Helsinki. The station is most famous for being the place
where Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia from exile in Switzerland on April
3, 1917 just ahead of the October Revolution.)

There
is an Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg that offers an education on the subject
of Apartheid. It also delivers a similar emotional impact to the Holocaust
Museum in Washington DC. There is a quote by Nelson Mandela on a wall outside
the Apartheid Museum:

Perhaps
his greatest legacy was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that allowed
the stories of the Apartheid era to be told. Although few whites in South
Africa took part in the process, it offered a cleansing and a release for most
people in the country and allowed them to move on peacefully.

Had
another leader been the one released from prison, it is quite likely that the
transition from Apartheid would have been bloody and violent.  

What’s
Wrong Today:

Last Sunday, two Congressional
leaders who chair their respective branch’s intelligence committees spoke to
the news bunnies about terrorism and our need to spend more on the NSA to fight
terrorism, even while they voted to send more weapons and aid to terrorists in Syria.

We are talking about Mike
Rogers, (R-MI) who heads the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, and Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA) who heads
the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. Let’s review the hypocrisy: Rogers & Feinstein were
scaremongering the American people with the Syrian jihadis, yet both had voted
to give the Syrian rebels $ millions in arms. These two have to know what
we all know, that some Syrian
rebels are calling for terrorist attacks on America.  And we’ve known
for a while that much
of the weapons we’re shipping to Syria are ending up in the hands of Al Qaeda.
From Juan Cole:

It appears that Feinstein
and Rogers were trying to demonstrate a
“need” for the country-wide NSA dragnets that sweep up digital information
about most Americans. The Guardian
quotes Rogers as saying that al-Qaeda
groups had changed their means of communication as a result of the Snowden/Wikileaks disclosures about US surveillance programs, making it harder to detect potential plots
in the early planning stages: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Marcy Wheeler at Empty
Wheel explains the hypocrisy: (bracketed comment below by the Wrongologist)

They are saying that
we are less safe than we were  two years
ago. In fact, Rogers
said that “thousands” of Westerners”
have gone to fight in Syria. But the FBI estimates
the number to be fighting in Syria at 24. That’s just two dozen.

And is
there any real reason to think that Americans are less safe than a couple of
years back? Not according to CNN’s Peter Bergen, who looked at
the actual numbers. Bergen relies on a New
America Foundation study of Americans and residents indicted or killed over
the last decade, showing that those numbers show terrorist incidents to be
going down. From Bergen:

The total number of
indicted extremists has declined substantially from 33 in 2010 to nine in 2013.
And the number of individuals indicted for plotting attacks within the United
States, as opposed to being indicted for traveling to join a terrorist group
overseas or for sending money to a foreign terrorist group, also declined from 12 in 2011 to only three in 2013.

Further, according to WaPo,
the types of organized groups that carry out terrorist attacks are extremely
diverse:

(GTD in the
caption above stands for Global Terrorism Database). If you are interested, the
University of Maryland’s Global
Terrorism Database is a useful tool for tracking these events.

Al-Qaeda
dominates the above list, and the two Eco-terrorism groups have been
particularly active, though they are both declining.
But aside from that, terrorist groups seem to come in all types. The report
notes:

Recent plots
in the United States also do not show signs of direction from foreign terrorist
organizations such as al Qaeda, but instead are conducted by individuals who
are influenced by the ideology of violent jihad, usually because of what they
read or watch on the Internet. Indeed,
of the 45 homegrown extremists who were indicted, convicted or killed between
2011 and 2013, 18 are known to have communicated with other extremists over the
Internet or posted materials related to their radicalization online.

Finally, your odds
of dying in a terrorist attack are still far lower than dying from just
about anything else. In the past five years, the odds of an
American being killed in a terrorist attack have been about 1
in 20 million (that’s including both domestic attacks and overseas
attacks). As the chart
below from the Economist shows, that’s considerably smaller than the
risk of dying from many other things, from post-surgery complications to ordinary
gun violence to lightning: (Chart was cropped by the Wrongologist. Approximately 3400 Americans have died in terror-related attacks since 1970)

Rogers
& Feinstein: Not as catchy as Rogers & Hammerstein. Hate to quote
George Michael, but “guilty feet have got no rhythm”…

Rogers
& Feinstein have nerve: They support the Syrian jihadis and then point to Syrian
jihadis as the reason why the NSA must stay deeply in the shorts of the
American people.

The
threat maybe increasing, but that is not proven by the data.

If
your government is fighting wars in the name of freedom, the entire rationale
is flawed if your government denies basic, Constitutionally-mandated liberties to
its citizens.

Then,
the terrorists win by default.

What’s
Wrong Today:

Didn’t
President Eisenhower have a better economic record than President Carter? Saint
Ronnie surely was better for the economy than President Johnson.

Wrong
on both counts.

An
interesting new research paper by Princeton Professors Alan
Blinder and Mark Watson examines differences in performance of the economy
under Democratic versus Republican presidents. The paper begins:

James
Hamilton of the Econobrowser
Blog took the data from the paper and helpfully provides this graph: (numbers
on the vertical axis are % annual GDP growth)

Leaving
aside the headline and taking away the political labels, the most scary thing
that the graph shows is a strong
downward trend in our GDP growth rate throughout the period, from greater than
4% to less than 2% since Clinton’s 2nd term.

The
data developed by Blinder and Watson show that Mr. Obama has the worst economic
performance by a Democratic President since Truman, and possibly, since Wilson,
but he has about the same results as Bush II’s 2nd administration, Bush
I’s 1st, and the Nixon-Ford administration.  

Mr. Carter
is unfairly maligned. His economic performance was better than his reputation.
He took on the 2nd oil shock and the Iranian hostage episode. Carter
may have been unloved by business, but his performance was not as bad as portrayed
by Mr. Reagan or his other critics. In fact, GDP growth even under Carter is better than the average growth under
Republican presidents.

Mr. Reagan’s
performance, by contrast, was not as good as our Republican friends would like
us to believe.

Mr. Clinton
may have been the best Republican since Eisenhower, except for that impeachment
thingy by Republicans. His polices (reducing the size of government and
achieving a balanced budget) were far more conservative than any Republican’s in
our collective memory. He is the only President in recent memory that we can consider
as having a clear success with economic policy. And he is the only one who left
the country in a better position than he found it.

Messrs. Bush
I and II did not perform well on the economic growth yardstick, while LBJ had
great GDP growth, but it wasn’t enough to allow him to run for a second term. Mr.
Nixon’s economic policies were really from the left, rather than right. He
implemented both wage and price controls and took us off the Gold Standard in 1971. The Recession of
1973-1975 occurred under Nixon. He also had the task of running the US
during the Vietnam war and struggled with the first oil shock.

Mr.
Eisenhower’s lackluster economic performance may surprise most of us. His
relatively weak performance seems out of context from what we remember about
the 1950’s.

Since
Clinton, we have had a series of bubbles in real estate, securitized real estate,
student loans, corporate high yield debt, trophy art, and a bubble in the
number of economists and politicians who said that we have no bubbles.

So,
what explains the difference in economic performance between Republican and
Democratic Presidents?

Blinder
and Watson are not sure. They find little statistical explanation of the  differences in monetary or fiscal policy under
Democrats compared with Republicans. One of the variables that they think did
play a role is oil price shocks.

The Suez
Crisis of 1956-57, OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, Iran-Iraq War beginning in
November 1980, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 all occurred during
Republican terms, and all seemed to contribute to weak performance of the US
economy. Jimmy Carter was the one Democratic president who also experienced an
oil shock, during the Iranian revolution in 1978-79, and he had a fairly weak
economic record, if only by comparison to other Democratic presidents.

Another factor
that the researchers identify as potentially important is consumer confidence.
For whatever reason, consumers on average have had a more positive outlook on the
economy when a Democrat was in the White House. In Blinder and Watson’s
statistical analysis, this seems to account for about 25% of the difference
between the performance of Democrats vs. Republicans. They conclude:

So
the economists can’t figure out why one party is better than the other when it
comes to the economy. We all know that  “correlation
is not causality”, even if we think it just might be in this case.

Since
economists haven’t found the answer, perhaps we should simply take it on faith
that GDP growth is something that the Democrats just do better.

Republicans
take things on faith all the time.

Maybe
it’s time for the rest of us to subscribe to a faith-based view of which party
will do a better job on the economy.

A week of family and friends, wrapped around a turkey dinner for most of us. But for some, inequality still rears its ugly head, particularly on the holidays:

Now let’s return to the words of Pope Francis, who last week, pushed back hard against our political classes:

Pope Francis derides the connivance of political leaders in the growth and consolidation of a malevolent socioeconomic global order that brought about these statistics:

• No growth in median real income since the 1970’s
• 15% of our people needing food stamps in order to avoid hunger
• 18 million Americans either out of work, or wanting more work hours
• 50 million without health insurance

Rush Limbaugh called the Pope a “Marxist” for his statements this week about economics and inequality. Here is what Numerian at the Agonist had to say about King Rushbag of Oxycontin:

It is not
surprising that Rush Limbaugh, spiritual leader of the Republican Party – the
man who determines Republican ideology and who enforces obedience to orthodoxy
within the party – now finds Pope Francis a “Marxist”.  Pope Francis,
spiritual leader to over one billion Catholics, has issued a direct assault on
the Rush Limbaugh’s of this world, their paymasters in the business and financial
community, and their political lackeys

If they are listening to Francis, Catholic members of the Supreme Court, Roberts, Scalia and Alito should feel less certitude about their readings of our Constitution. In less than a year as Pope, Francis has undermined several precepts of conservatism as it is practiced today. 

This week also saw big push back against Mr. Obama’s 6 month deal with Iran. Israel’s Prime Minister has a different view of the new plan:

Old men and their geopolitical theories send young Americans to war:

The six-month nuclear deal with Iran caused much snark among the chicken hawk intellectuals who cannot abide President Obama’s willingness to talk with his adversaries. It is entirely possible the deal may fail, but giving diplomacy a try is certainly preferable to another march to war.

If the Iran deal pays off, maybe the President will justify the Nobel Peace Prize he won prematurely in 2009, and the neo-cons may find themselves bereft of any new battlefields.

Except for China.

In November, the Wrongologist Blog passed 58,000 page views in
the past year, up from 25k views a year ago. We now have a run rate of 8,300
views per month, that’s on track for 100,000 reads in the next 12 months!

Many thanks to all of you who read and especially to those of you who
comment, or suggest that others check out the Wrongologist Blog.


The Wrongologist doesn’t publish this blog to make money,
but because he wants to get people to make better decisions in our political process. We poke holes in the positions of doctrinaire politicians
who keep pushing talking points rather than looking at the facts. He has
an often stated antipathy for dissembling,
mendacious politicians.

We all know what is wrong in America, but we
are paralyzed by ideology, and can’t (won’t) do anything to solve our problems.
This blog hopes education and argument will help end our paralysis.

Some say that the Wrongologist blog is not an easy read
and that some posts may be too long for today’s attention spans. The
Wrongologist tries to distill complex issues to as near to their essence as possible,
but we live in a complicated world where the details of policy and politics
really matter.

Hopefully more readers will leave comments. They help other readers understand
the issues at hand. Anyway, 58,000 reads is a good time to take a moment and
post thanks to those who follow the Wrongologist blog. If you enjoy the
Wrongologist, please tell a friend about it.

I’d like to recognize Terry,
Monty, Fred and David for their continuing support of the blog, and Ms.
Oh So Right who acts as its editor.

Please give to your local food bank. Given
Congress’s cutting of the food stamp program, it has never been more important
to help the hungry, and there are so many more of them.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!