Month: November 2012

For those of us who are dead inside …

by digby

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A John Galt Thanksgiving

by digby

This fatuous Jeff Jacoby column from 2003 is making the rounds again this year and a whole new generation of right wingers is learning to turn the American Puritan myth of cooperation and community into a celebration of individuality and market occultism. It’s how they roll:

Isn’t there something wondrous — something almost inexplicable — in the way your Thanksgiving weekend is made possible by the skill and labor of vast numbers of total strangers?

To bring that turkey to the dining room table required the efforts of thousands of people — the poultry farmers who raised the birds, of course, but also the feed distributors who supplied their nourishment and the truckers who brought it to the farm, not to mention the architect who designed the hatchery, the workmen who built it, and the technicians who keep it running. The bird had to be slaughtered and defeathered and inspected and transported and unloaded and wrapped and priced and displayed. The people who accomplished those tasks were supported in turn by armies of other people accomplishing other tasks — from refining the gasoline that fueled the trucks to manufacturing the plastic in which the meat was packaged.

The activities of countless far-flung men and women over the course of many months had to be intricately choreographed and precisely timed, so that when you showed up to buy a fresh Thanksgiving turkey, there would be one — or more likely, a few dozen — waiting. The level of coordination that was required to pull it off is mind-boggling. But what is even more mind-boggling is this: No one coordinated it.

No turkey czar sat in a command post somewhere, consulting a master plan and issuing orders. No one forced people to cooperate for your benefit. And yet they did cooperate. When you arrived at the supermarket, your turkey was there. You didn’t have to do anything but show up to buy it. If that isn’t a miracle, what should we call it?

Adam Smith called it “the invisible hand” — the mysterious power that leads innumerable people, each working for his own gain, to promote ends that benefit many. Out of the seeming chaos of millions of uncoordinated private transactions emerges the spontaneous order of the market. Free human beings freely interact, and the result is an array of goods and services more immense than the human mind can comprehend. No dictator, no bureaucracy, no supercomputer plans it in advance. Indeed, the more an economy is planned, the more it is plagued by shortages, dislocation, and failure.

It is commonplace to speak of seeing God’s signature in the intricacy of a spider’s web or the animation of a beehive. But they pale in comparison to the kaleidoscopic energy and productivity of the free market. If it is a blessing from Heaven when seeds are transformed into grain, how much more of a blessing is it when our private, voluntary exchanges are transformed – without our ever intending it – into prosperity, innovation, and growth?”

It sounds to me as if the God of the Free Market with his “invisible hand” goosing human productivity is more formidable than God. Unfortunately, he requires human sacrifice.

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Turkeys

by digby

In more ways than one ….

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

A New World Pilgrimage courtesy Antonin Dvorak

by David Atkins

In the spirit of pilgrimages and a New World, take a break from politics this morning to enjoy the 4th movement of Antonin Dvorak’s New World Symphony written in 1893, performed here by the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR under the dynamic (some might say histrionic!) leadership of Gustavo Dudamel. Dvorak had a great appreciation for African-American and Native American music, of which the latter is reflected stylistically in the piece.

This performance, one of the best on Youtube in my opinion, unfortunately took place at a birthday concert for Pope Benedict, a man who didn’t deserve the honor of such a majestic performance.

But there I go again with the politics. Enough for the moment. Enjoy great music and a Happy Thanksgiving!

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All we are saying …

by digby

It’s terribly unfashionable and unsophisticated to say it, but when it comes right down to it, this is the only answer.

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Rush’s mess is radio’s mess

by digby

It would appear that Rush Limbaugh’s vile form of commentary is starting to have a negative impact on radio profits as a whole:

Doug Stephan, president of Stephan MultiMedia and host of the nationally syndicated “Good Day” program, had this to offer:

Let’s face it, the agencies and advertisers are how we survive. So to tell them that their clients are stupid for not staying in an atmosphere in which they don’t want to be is akin to the Republicans not reading the tea leaves about changing demographics.

I’m not here to argue the point, but rather to tell you what this ONE incident has cost me as an independent in a sea of big corporate operators, who are obviously losing tens of millions of dollars due to this one event.

So far this year, my losses are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Cancellations, avoidance and decisions to just not buy across the whole format, no matter what the content…

I’m not looking for Limbaugh to send me a check (although that would be nice), but I do think we have to let it be known that his actions have been devastating to our survival.

—Doug Stephan: Talk Must Expand Beyond Politics to Survive, November 19, 2012

This is very interesting. Limbaugh has always been a big driver of radio profits. If that is changing because people are so disgusted they’ve truly begun to boycott his advertisers to protest, it’s significant. Right wing hate radio is a truly ugly contributor to the public discourse and Limbaugh is its King. He has a right to say whatever he wants, but no advertiser has the obligation to pay him to say it.

I’m sure Rush will always be supported by his powerful friends. Here’s Mary Matalin calling in during the worst of the fighting in the Iraq war, just to tell him she loves him:

[Y]ou inspired me this morning. There’s no reason that I have to do that. I’m — and at least I think I do, but when I listen to you, I get all the information I need, and I — and I — it is — I have a confidence in the President, in the policies, in the goals. I have — I know his conviction. I know he’s right and I know he has the leadership to do it. What I don’t have, and what I can only get from you, is the cheerfulness of your confidence —

That was probably the high point.

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Douthat: America can’t be Sweden because blacks and Hispanics, that’s why

by David Atkins

There’s been an interesting conversation in the last few days between Ross Douthat and Paul Krugman. Douthat’s original piece laid the blame for the need for a welfare state on social decay. Krugman responded that economic insecurity leads to both that decay of private institutions and more importantly the need for a welfare state to take care of what the private sector increasingly cannot or will not. My personal response is that there public intervention can help people achieve their potential in the face of oppressive private institutions, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Well, Douthat responsds today with a piece that betrays so many distasteful and hypocritical parts of the conservative ID it could take a long-form essay to deconstruct. Because Douthat just isn’t worth that effort, a few highlights will do:

Let’s start with Douthat’s “admission” that social conservatism alone can’t answer the economic needs of the people (yes, that’s actually something reasonable people are arguing over:

As Noah Millman of the American Conservative put it recently, “a marriage culture requires a material basis” that seems out of reach for too many Americans.

The argument for “marriage = prosperity” is standard conservative sleight of hand that ignores the the devastating economic trend of the last fifty years that few people liberal or conservative want to talk about, each for their own reasons.

It now takes two and a half incomes to produce the same standard living that one income did in the 1950s. True, we now as a society take for granted the purchase of more goods, mostly electronic gadgets, for a middle-class household than we did back then. But it remains that reality that the American people essentially doubled the number of people in the workforce and forced them to work longer, harder hours–with little in the way of standard-of-living improvement. That in turn has created obvious stresses on marriage. Poverty and financial stress can cause breakups, obviously, which combined with later marriage age partly explains the lower divorce rates in wealthier blue states. But more importantly, the old social system relied on an economic codependency: men typically went out and earned the money, while women stayed home to take care of the kids and manage the household. This, of course, was deeply unfair to women and the end of that implied system is a good thing. But a consequence of women’s liberation is that married partners should and do in theory need one another less, being each economically independent and able to earn their own living. That in turn means that relationship problems that might have been unhappily papered over in the old days through codependency can now lead to happier separations.

This freedom of economic self-determination is a good thing, and wouldn’t be problematic at all if wages had kept pace with inflation, and if women were getting paid an equal amount for comparable work. Marriage, in theory, shouldn’t be a prerequisite for financial success. The fact that a single income can no longer provide economic security to a family isn’t the fault of social liberals but rather of economic conservatives who have helped to tamp down wages, forcing two people to have to provide what one person could do in the past.

But the core of Douthat’s argument is what exposes the conservative program for what it really is: thinly veiled racism. Here’s Douthat:

The Swedish experience does demonstrate that it’s possible for a welfare-state society to survive the waning of religion and the decline of traditional marriage without sacrificing middle class prosperity. But this success is founded on a level of cultural homogeneity and an inheritance of social capital that simply isn’t available in a polyglot republic-cum-empire like our own. Sweden has the population of North Carolina, no real linguistic or religious diversity, no experience of chattel slavery or mass immigration (and the children of recent immigrants in Sweden, incidentally, tend to have much higher poverty rates than the native-born), and a culture of Lutheran thrift and prudence that endures even though Lutheranism itself is on life support. America is and always has been a country of much greater diversity and wider cultural extremes, which is why we’ve always had to lean more heavily than smaller and more homogeneous societies on a wide array of mediating institutions — churches, families and private associations of all sorts — to foster assimilation, encourage upward mobility, and make the pursuit of happiness a possibility for people from wildly different walks of life. Even if the Scandinavian counter-example — in which a strong government compensates for a weakened social fabric — has some applicability here, it offers fewer lessons than many liberals like to think.

Douthat’s much-cherished private institutions did less than nothing to hold together America’s multicultural fabric. Indeed, they have tended to do more to damage it than anything else. American churches have a history of deep segregation, with white churches a hotbed of racial, religious, misogynistic and homophobic intolerance. At every step when the country has attempted to move forward in the area of economic justice, it has pitted a combination of secular authority and sometimes segregated minority religious institutions against powerful oppressive interests using religion as a battering ram to maintain their privileges. Church groups are the biggest opponents of LGBT rights, church groups are the biggest opponents of women’s rights, and white churches were the biggest hotbeds of KKK “activism.”

The claim that “families” have held together a melting pot society doesn’t even make sense. “Family values” cultures tend to do the most to bully and oppress those who step outside of majority social norms.

As for the rest of “private institutions”, it’s not exactly clear how that works, either. Private clubs like the Elks have long had issues of racial discrimination; some private golf clubs have just now gotten around to admitting female members. At each and every step, it has been public institutions that have stepped forward to enable our multicultural to function and coexist in a prosperous and healthy way, even as America’s private institutions have typically been dragged kicking and screaming into a brighter, more equitable world.

What Douthat is really saying here (and he’s far from the first) is that Sweden has racial and cultural homogeneity, and a “culture of Lutheran thrift and prudence.” By contrast he means to imply that America has too much history of racism, and that American minorities are too lazy to make the Swedish system work.

Broken down to its core, that’s the essence of the conservative argument against the welfare state: women, young people and minorities just don’t have the same “work ethic” that white men do, so they can’t be trusted with the privileges of a welfare state. That’s the meat of the entire conservative argument once stripped of it garnish and sauce.

It’s an argument women, youth and minorities hear loud and clear. That’s why no matter how much conservative activists like Douthat think themselves to be enlightened reformers of the conservative movement, it won’t help their demographic problem. The Douthats of the world have an unshakeable cultural disrespect for women and minorities without which their entire worldview falls apart.

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Tell Uncle Charlie he’s not going to live forever after all


by digby

I have written about this many, many times before but it bears repeating.  The whole “life expectancy” trope is basically a lie perpetrated by the enemies of social security (and the privatizers who want that money.)  This piece from Lynn Parrymore at Alternet is one you should print out and take with you to the family Thanksgiving and pull it out when Uncle Charlie starts droning on about how the system is going broke:

Here are five clear reasons why the life expectancy argument is nonsensical, counterproductive and based on a pack of lies.

1. Social Security’s original designers considered rising life expectancy.

On our red-herring tour, let’s start with the oft-repeated claim that the original designers of the program did not consider rising life expectancy in their calculations. Fortunately, public records pertaining to the lengthy and detailed discussions of the Roosevelt administration’s Committee on Economic Security (CES), tasked with constructing proposals for Social Security, are available for anyone to see. It is absolutely clear from the record that the designers knew that the number of people over the age of 65 was going to increase and that people were going to live longer.

There were differences – as there are now – on exactly how to project this demographic shift, but the idea that a growing rate of older folks taking payouts was bound to happen was a topic of intense scrutiny. Consider the Old Age Security Staff Report, dated January 1935:

“At the time of the last Census (1930) there were six and a half million people 65 years of age and over in the United States. They constituted 5.4% of the population. As a result of a declining birth rate in this country, which manifested itself about 1820 and persisted from that time, the ratio of aged persons has shown a continuous growth from the date. The increase was very slow for 40 years, more rapid from 1860 on, and noticeably accelerated between 1920 and 1930. The latter was due to a rather sharp decline in birth rate which set in about 1920. This decline is expected to persist, moreover, and will of course produce a correspondingly sharp increase in the ratio of the aged to the population as a whole. The recent improvement in mortality rate makes its contribution to this situation.”

That’s right: Not only did the designers know full well that a larger population of older folks was coming, they actually made projections based on that assumption well into the future. They even produced a handy table which projects that increase all the way up to 1980, anticipating a 140 percent increase in the 60 years following 1920.

2. Life expectancy gains since 1935 have been modest.

Another popular argument for cutting Social Security by raising the retirement age assumes a vast difference in human longevity between 1935 and today. You’ll hear this group of hustlers claiming that life expectancy for Americans was less than 62 years in 1935, and now it’s more than 77 years, so the program must be inadequate. Alan Simpson of the infamous Simpson-Bowles Commission, who ought to know better since he has been weighing in on Social Security policy, is a fan of this line of argument. Clearly, Simpson has not bothered to read the actual public record on Social Security, or he is knowingly lying.

Here’s the truth of the matter: The early figure was based on life expectancy at birth. That is a vastly different matter from projecting how long people will live after they reach the age of 65 and start collecting benefits. In the 1930s, there was much higher infant mortality, and children died much more frequently from diseases that are now preventable through immunization. Because our parents’ and grandparents’ generations had a high rate of early death, the life expectancy at birth in 1930 was indeed less than 62 years. But here’s the catch: Social Security is funded by the workers who collect the benefits, along with their employers. Obviously, if you die as a child, you are not going to collect benefits. So the significant measure is not how long you’re going to live after you are born, but rather how long you’re going to live once you hit 65.

In reality, the average life expectancy once a person has reached the age 65 has increased only a modest five years on average since 1940.

So let’s be clear. Workers who reach the age of 65 today are only living five years longer than their parents. The designers of the program were fully aware of this possibility when they calculated the retirement age and they constructed the program accordingly.

3. The Greenspan Commission already raised the retirement age two years.

Back in 1983, just as Reagan was ushering in the destructive era of supply-side economics, the Social Security hustlers conspired to raise a great hue and cry about the program, which led to the creation of the Greenspan Commission. The Commission looked at the future increase in retired Baby Boomers and also considered increases in overall life expectancy. The result? People like me who were born after 1960 will have to wait until they’re 67 to collect full benefits. If you’re younger than 52, two years of your retirement were taken away in the name of “permanently fixing Social Security.” For those a bit older you’ve had one year shaved off.

The Greenspan Commission demanded raising the payroll tax, cutting benefits and gradually raising the retirement age on future retirees. After these changes were enacted, Social Security accumulated enormous surpluses in its trust funds. As economist Robert Reich has explained, until 2012, Social Security took in more payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits and lent the surpluses to the rest of the government. The only reason the program took in less than it paid out in 2010 was due to the Wall Street-driven financial crash. But guess what? Social Security is so well-designed that the interest paid on government bonds more than made up for that difference.

1983 is a long time ago, and because the full increase in retirement age has not yet affected retirees (that experiment is waiting for those under 52) it’s easy for the Social Security hustlers to pretend that it never happened. But it did, and we do not yet know the social impacts of that decision. Since the people who had their Social Security cut are likely to suffer from increased job insecurity and a lack of traditional pensions, we may expect that the impact will not be pleasant for future retirees, excluding the very wealthy.

The Social Security hustlers have already gambled with our future, and now, using the excuse of the recession, they have committed themselves to doing it again.

4. Longevity gains have gone mostly to high earners.

Exhaustive research has clearly demonstrated that income inequality leads to poorer health among people who are not well-off, and that gains in life expectancy have primarily gone to high income workers. A report in the New York Times, “Gap in Life Expectancy Widens for the Nation” explains that while longevity for the whole country has gone up, affluent people have gained more, and this has cause a widening gap in life span:

…Gopal K. Singh, a demographer at the Department of Health and Human Services, said “the growing inequalities in life expectancy” mirrored trends in infant mortality and in death from heart disease and certain cancers….

Dr. Singh said last week that federal officials had found “widening socioeconomic inequalities in life expectancy” at birth and at every age level.

In the same NYT report, Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejects the idea that such a gap is somehow inevitable as better and more expensive medical treatment becomes available:

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”

The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.

Income inequality is notably awful in the US, and according to the centrist Brookings Institute, our life expectancy is predictably lower than that of other industrialized countries. Our ranking among the 34 countries in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development is a shameful 27. Of the 21 large OECD countries with the highest incomes, America finishes “dead last.”

Life expectancy among the less educated and those with lower incomes has actually dropped. New research shows that between 1990 and 2008, white women lacking a high school diploma lost a shocking five years of life, while their male peers lost three years.

Under these circumstances, it’s clear that raising the retirement age is a direct assault on those at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, women in particular, and that it would only serve to increase income inequality even further and diminish the chances of long life among anyone but the rich.

5. Life expectancy rises are likely to slow in the future.

The Social Security hustlers like to make wild predictions that life expectancy will grow in the future at a rapid rate and that our children and grandchildren will be living up to 10 years longer than we do. As we’ve seen, when you’re talking about life expectancy after age 65, gains since Social Security was originally designed are only five years—and those gains are largely among the well-off.

The truth is that there’s not much reason to think that giant increases in life expectancy are going to happen for the vast majority of people – even the more affluent.

A report in the Washington Post shows that contrary to popular belief, we’ve actually seen average life expectancy among all Americans take a small dip in recent years:

Those born in 2008 can only expect to live to be 77.8 years old, down from 77.9 years for those born in 2007, according to anannual preliminary analysis of data conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Yes, there have been steady increases since 1975, but it’s also true that there were drops between 1992 and 1993 (75.8 to 75.5) and between 2004 and 2005 (77.5 to 77.4). Federal budget projections assume Baby Boomers will live much longer than their parents, thanks to new drugs, improved medical care and so on. But not so fast. Factors including obesity, cancer, increased cardiovascular problems, and even higher rates of suicide, could slow or actually reverse the longevity trend.

Justin Denny of Rice University warns that it would be a mistake to base projections in longevity gains of the current century based on the last one. Unfortunately, that’s just what the trustees who estimate the future solvency of the U.S. Social Security retirement program have been doing.

In conclusion: cutting Social Security by raising the retirement age is nothing but a trick meant to fool us into thinking that there’s something wrong with a program that keeps millions of American retirees out of poverty. To even consider such a scheme in a time of widespread suffering is one of the most shameful outcomes of the Great Recession. Social Security is efficient, well-managed, and is not undergoing any crisis.

You will be hearing lots of convincing-sounding rhetoric on this topic in upcoming weeks –often from Democrats – including the notion that we should be means-testing Social Security for longevity among high-income earners. That plan plays into the mythology that the program is somehow broken and needs to be “fixed.” It also plays into the game of fiscal conservatives who know full well that means testing will diminish support, which is why they have been ardently pushing it for 50 years. It’s yet another red herring. Social Security is not contributing to the deficit, and if — and that’s a big if — a tweak is needed down the road, we can easily accomplish that by raising the cap on payroll taxes, which stands just above $100K. In reality, there is absolutely no sound justification for doing anything now. The bottom line is that raising the retirement age and making changes based on longevity does not pass the test of morality, logic, or sound economics.

I’m sure you’ll all remember this hideous little exchange with Alan Simpson.  You know, the man who served as co-chair of the committee that decided all on its own to put social security into the mix even though it was only tasked with dealing with the deficit (which SS doesn’t affect)? It’s patently obvious that he is completely clueless about life expectancy — in fact,  clueless is too kind.  He’s an utter moron on the subject.

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The old doctor’s little white slip is showing.  Again.


by digby

Well, well well.  It looks as though you can take the libertarian out of the states’ rightist, but you can’t take the states’ rightist out of the libertarian after all.  Here’s the freedom lovin’ Ron Paul, going back to his roots with a statement from just yesterday:

Is it treasonous to want to secede from the United States? Many think the question of secession was settled by our Civil War. On the contrary; the principles of self-governance and voluntary association are at the core of our founding. Clearly Thomas Jefferson believed secession was proper, albeit as a last resort. Writing to William Giles in 1825, he concluded that states:

“should separate from our companions only when the sole alternatives left, are the dissolution of our Union with them, or submission to a government without limitation of powers.”

Keep in mind that the first and third paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence expressly contemplate the dissolution of a political union when the underlying government becomes tyrannical.

Do we have a “government without limitation of powers” yet? The Federal government kept the Union together through violence and force in the Civil War, but did might really make right?

You’ve just got to love that depiction of the civil war. Apparently, slavery is a fundamental American freedom.

But never let it be said that Dr Paul knew a thing about those white supremacist newsletters he put his name to.  And hey, even if he did, it was just a ploy to attract the racists into the libertarian fold.  He didn’t mean it or anything.

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Smokin’ hot T-Day dessert recipe: Chocolate Pawlenty cake


by digby

In past Pre-Thanksgiving day Wednesdays,  I’ve posted a recipe I call “Karen Tumulty pumpkin cake”  for people to take to their feast tomorrow. You can read that recipe and the story behind it here.

This year, I thought I’d share a chocolate treat, also quite easy, although you will need at least a hand mixer to make it work.  It’s a polenta cake, which means it has corn meal in it, but the texture is more like a pudding cake.

I call it Chocolate Pawlenty Cake:

Ingredients:
1 cup water
1/4 cup yellow corn meal
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped fine (Valrhona preferred in my kitchen, but Nestles chocolate chips are fine)
1 stick unsalted butter
4 egg yolks
5 egg whites
2 tablespoon sugar
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Generously butter a 9 inch pie plate

Cook cornmeal at medium heat in water until thick, approximately 10 minutes.  Let stand for about 2 minutes and then add chocolate, butter and vanilla, stirring to melt chocolate. Allow to cool.

Beat egg yolks until they are light yellow, add cooled chocolate cornmeal mixture and stir to combine.

In a clean, dry bowl, whip the egg whites until soft peaks form. Add the sugar and continue whipping just until stiff and glossy, about 30 seconds.

Carefully fold the whites into the chocolate cornmeal mixture without breaking down the whites. (If you’re  unsure about how to do this, here are a ton of Youtubes showing the technique. It’s really easy.)

Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake until the center is firm and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean (a few crumbs are okay), 1 to 1 1/4 hours. Let cool in the pan.

Top with whipped cream.

You won’t taste the cornmeal and the texture is quite creamy and chocolaty.

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