Month: January 2013

Joseph Stiglitz hits the income inequality nail on the head

by David Atkins

This Joseph Stiglitz piece in the New York Times has been making the rounds so forcefully that it almost seems redundant to relay it again here. But it’s too good and too important not to use even this space to amplify it once more with feeling:

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues — as it did in a special feature in October — that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth. While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle — who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators — have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996. The growth in the decade before the crisis was unsustainable — it was reliant on the bottom 80 percent consuming about 110 percent of their income.

Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

Third, the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks. The recent modest agreement to restore Clinton-level marginal income-tax rates for individuals making more than $400,000 and households making more than $450,000 did nothing to change this. Returns from Wall Street speculation are taxed at a far lower rate than other forms of income. Low tax receipts mean that the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.

Fourth, inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable. Though inequality did not directly cause the crisis, it is no coincidence that the 1920s — the last time inequality of income and wealth in the United States was so high — ended with the Great Crash and the Depression. The International Monetary Fund has noted the systematic relationship between economic instability and economic inequality, but American leaders haven’t absorbed the lesson.

But this is the inevitable outcome of the global economy, right? Market forces are like natural forces, and it makes as much sense to fight them as it does to fight the winds and the tides, right? Wrong.

There are all kinds of excuses for inequality. Some say it’s beyond our control, pointing to market forces like globalization, trade liberalization, the technological revolution, the “rise of the rest.” Others assert that doing anything about it would make us all worse off, by stifling our already sputtering economic engine. These are self-serving, ignorant falsehoods.

Market forces don’t exist in a vacuum — we shape them. Other countries, like fast-growing Brazil, have shaped them in ways that have lowered inequality while creating more opportunity and higher growth. Countries far poorer than ours have decided that all young people should have access to food, education and health care so they can fulfill their aspirations.

Our legal framework and the way we enforce it has provided more scope here for abuses by the financial sector; for perverse compensation for chief executives; for monopolies’ ability to take unjust advantage of their concentrated power…

Globalization, and the unbalanced way it has been pursued, has shifted bargaining power away from workers: firms can threaten to move elsewhere, especially when tax laws treat such overseas investments so favorably. This in turn has weakened unions, and though unions have sometimes been a source of rigidity, the countries that responded most effectively to the global financial crisis, like Germany and Sweden, have strong unions and strong systems of social protection.

As Mr. Obama’s second term begins, we must all face the fact that our country cannot quickly, meaningfully recover without policies that directly address inequality. What’s needed is a comprehensive response that should include, at least, significant investments in education, a more progressive tax system and a tax on financial speculation.

Go read the whole thing if you haven’t already. Stiglitz’ argument would serve as the basis of all economic policy in America if the system were just. Moreover, Stiglitz’ proposed solutions are popular with the majority of voters. They’re just not popular with the majority of lobbyists, wealthy campaign backers, and millionaire media cocktail party types.

My vote in the 2016 Presidential Primary will go to the candidate who offers Mr. Stiglitz (and/or Mr. Krugman) the role of chief economic adviser.

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Open Gummint

by digby

Fergawdsakes:

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI seeking details of its surveillance policy — who it spies upon, and how, and under what circumstances. The FBI sent back two 50+ page memos in reply, each of them totally blacked out except for some information on the title page.

Seriously. They did that.

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“There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available”

by digby

This seems apropos on the week-end celebrating both the birthday of Martin Luther King and the second inaugural of Barack Obama. It’s from Planned Parenthood, commemorating their first Margaret Sanger award in 1966 to four men for “excellence and leadership in furthering reproductive health and reproductive rights.” Martin Luther King was one of them. This is the speech he prepared for the occasion:

Family Planning — A Special and Urgent Concern

by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.

There is no human circumstance more tragic than the persisting existence of a harmful condition for which a remedy is readily available. Family planning, to relate population to world resources, is possible, practical and necessary. Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.

What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims.

It is easier for a Negro to understand a social paradox because he has lived so long with evils that could be eradicated but were perpetuated by indifference or ignorance. The Negro finally had to devise unique methods to deal with his problem, and perhaps the measure of success he is realizing can be an inspiration to others coping with tenacious social problems.

In our struggle for equality we were confronted with the reality that many millions of people were essentially ignorant of our conditions or refused to face unpleasant truths. The hard-core bigot was merely one of our adversaries. The millions who were blind to our plight had to be compelled to face the social evil their indifference permitted to flourish.

After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action.

We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.

There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger’s early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions. Margaret Sanger had to commit what was then called a crime in order to enrich humanity, and today we honor her courage and vision; for without them there would have been no beginning. Our sure beginning in the struggle for equality by nonviolent direct action may not have been so resolute without the tradition established by Margaret Sanger and people like her. Negroes have no mere academic nor ordinary interest in family planning. They have a special and urgent concern.

Recently the subject of Negro family life has received extensive attention. Unfortunately, studies have overemphasized the problem of the Negro male ego and almost entirely ignored the most serious element — Negro migration. During the past half century Negroes have migrated on a massive scale, transplanting millions from rural communities to crammed urban ghettoes. In their migration, as with all migrants, they carried with them the folkways of the countryside into an inhospitable city slum. The size of family that may have been appropriate and tolerable on a manually cultivated farm was carried over to the jammed streets of the ghetto. In all respects Negroes were atomized, neglected and discriminated against. Yet, the worst omission was the absence of institutions to acclimate them to their new environment. Margaret Sanger, who offered an important institutional remedy, was unfortunately ignored by social and political leaders in this period. In consequence, Negro folkways in family size persisted. The problem was compounded when unrestrained exploitation and discrimination accented the bewilderment of the newcomer, and high rates of illegitimacy and fragile family relationships resulted.

For the Negro, therefore, intelligent guides of family planning are a profoundly important ingredient in his quest for security and a decent life. There are mountainous obstacles still separating Negroes from a normal existence. Yet one element in stabilizing his life would be an understanding of and easy access to the means to develop a family related in size to his community environment and to the income potential he can command.

This is not to suggest that the Negro will solve all his problems through Planned Parenthood. His problems are far more complex, encompassing economic security, education, freedom from discrimination, decent housing and access to culture. Yet if family planning is sensible it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague him.

The Negro constitutes half the poor of the nation. Like all poor, Negro and white, they have many unwanted children. This is a cruel evil they urgently need to control. There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted. That which should be a blessing becomes a curse for parent and child. There is nothing inherent in the Negro mentality which creates this condition. Their poverty causes it. When Negroes have been able to ascend economically, statistics reveal they plan their families with even greater care than whites. Negroes of higher economic and educational status actually have fewer children than white families in the same circumstances.

Some commentators point out that with present birth rates it will not be long before Negroes are a majority in many of the major cities of the nation. As a consequence, they can be expected to take political control, and many people are apprehensive at this prospect. Negroes do not seek political control by this means. They seek only what they are entitled to and do not wish for domination purchased at the cost of human misery. Negroes were once bred by slave owners to be sold as merchandise. They do not welcome any solution which involves population breeding as a weapon. They are instinctively sympathetic to all who offer methods that will improve their lives and offer them fair opportunity to develop and advance as all other people in our society.

For these reasons we are natural allies of those who seek to inject any form of planning in our society that enriches life and guarantees the right to exist in freedom and dignity.

For these constructive movements we are prepared to give our energies and consistent support; because in the need for family planning, Negro and white have a common bond; and together we can and should unite our strength for the wise preservation, not of races in general, but of the one race we all constitute — the human race.

This is particularly poignant considering the disgusting anti-abortion propaganda campaign aimed at African Americans.

Not really.

Pregnant and hog-tied

by digby

Isn’t this special?

A pregnant woman who was pulled over for talking on her cellphone — and then hurled to the ground and hogtied by CHP officers on the shoulder of the busy Harbor Freeway — has been paid $250,000 in damages.

The 30-year-old woman was charged with resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license, but the charges were dropped after a judge was shown a video of the incident, captured on a camera mounted on the dashboard of a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

You’ll see why:

Once she pulls to the shoulder, after first pulling into the fast lane and appearing to cut off other drivers, a pair of CHP officers orders her to toss out her car keys, get out of her dark green Dodge Caravan and put her hands on the vehicle.

Instead, the video shows, she stands and stares at the patrolmen, appearing confused. Officers, in their official report, said she appeared to raise her arms in a menacing manner.

The action caught on the video picks up quickly from there:

Guns drawn, the officers approach the driver, and one of the patrolmen sweeps away her legs with a kick and pushes her face-first to the asphalt. Another officer then presses his knee into the woman’s back and pins her to the ground.

At another point, it appears the woman is kicked in her left ribs. Eventually she is hogtied and placed in a squad car.

“I’d never seen a gun for real before,” Gaglione said later. “I just froze. I was scared they’d shoot me.”

Gaglione said she told the officers she was pregnant when they first approached her, but Officer Daniel Hernandez — one of the initial officers on the scene — said she didn’t mention that until she was on the ground.

Hernandez said in his report that he kneed the woman in an effort to distract her so that his partner, Officer Roberto Martinez, could handcuff her.

In their report, the officers said the incident had escalated because the woman had ignored their orders and appeared to raise her arms in an aggressive manner after hopping out of the van.

The cops are all still on the job.

Oh, and by the way, it’s a miracle the judge ever saw this video. If he hadn’t, the victim would have very likely been convicted of resisting arrest:

When Tamara Gaglione was stopped on the side of a freeway for talking on her cellphone, she had no idea she’d end up hogtied and lying face down in the back of a police car.

But that’s exactly what happened to the 30-year-old woman, 2 months pregnant at the time. When California Highway Patrol officers pulled her over to the side of the 110 highway Aug. 30, 2011, they slammed her to the ground, hogtied her and shoved her in the back of their patrol car.

On the way to the station, she could hear officers discussing video of the encounter candidly, said attorney Howard Price to The Huffington Post. But when Price requested the video as evidence for Gaglione’s criminal trial, he was told there was no footage of the incident.

“I went back to them, and I said, ‘Look, am I stupid? This involved a chase. There must be a videotape,'” said Price. Eventually the prosecutor handed over footage from a backup officer’s camera, which showed nothing.

Finally, he was told the footage existed, but that no one could transfer the data to another medium — so he had to go to the CHP station himself to view it. Price made sure to record the footage for himself, and he uploaded the shocking video to YouTube.

I wonder if all lawyers are that persistent? I doubt it.

There are lots of budget problems here in California. You’d think the authorities would be a little bit more concerned about having to pay out quarter million dollar settlements for yahoo cops who have the judgement of hot-headed teenagers. At the very least you’d think they would get rid of employees who cost the taxpayers this kind of money.

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The Krauthamer gambit

by digby

The good news is that the Republicans appear to have decided to go with Charles Krauthamer’s idea to have a hostage negotiation every three months rather than destroy the economy. Big of them:

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The conclusion I came to is this. Republicans have tried brinksmanship, now twice under Obama with the fiscal cliff and debt ceiling, and got shellacked. And Gingrich tried it twice with the shutdowns in the ’90s, and he got shellacked. If you’re in opposition you cannot govern from the House. So, what do you do?

I thought the way to go ahead is do an incremental debt ceiling hikes where you ask for something relatively small but completely unassailable. I mean, what are the Democrats going to say? We’re now going to allow America to go to default because we refuse to ask the Democratic Senate to pass a budget, which under law it has to do and it hasn’t for 48 months?

(This column is what they are referring to.)

Short of having the Republicans get a collective brain transplant, this is probably the best we can hope for. But we don’t know if the rump GOP agrees with Krauthamer’s analysis that this is the best they can do. We’ll have to wait and see if they agree to do this in the “small” ways that he advises or whether they will instead pick just one painful (to Democrats) item and use that as their demand.(It could easily work that way if they wanted to do it.)Because in the end, no matter how you slice it, as long as the debt ceiling vote remains, they’ve got a hostage and they’ll still be threatening to kill it every three months. Whether they do this by a thousand cuts or one big explosion, the hostage still ends up dead. (If they have the nerve …)

Meanwhile, we still have the sequester to deal with, which has all kinds of interesting cross currents. If the GOP truly has adopted the Krauthamer plan to take small bites wherever they can get them and live to fight for 2014, then this too could blow over, which would be great. There is nothing that says they cannot simply void that stupid deal and come up with a more reasonable one if they really want to. So it’s at least possible that the worst of this may be over for the time being. (Of course, what is defined as “reasonable” is the scary part.)

But with the GOP showing this kind of weakness, it’s more important than ever that the Democrats zip their lips and fight their tendency to reach across the aisle and offer up something to the Republicans as a gesture of bipartisan goodwill. Like the Chained-CPI, which everyone in DC has convinced themselves is a fantastic idea. At this point, anything major that gets cut is because the Democrats want to cut it, not because they have to cut it.

Meanwhile, progressives should be lobbying for a clean debt ceiling and end this drama once and for all. It doesn’t sound as though the Republicans are willing to give up this toy altogether, but it’s always possible they’ll overreach in three months and the Democrats will have even more leverage. They should be prepared.

Progressive Congress is floating a petition that you can sign if you so choose:

Petition: I stand with progressives in Congress in support of abolishing the debt ceiling by passing the Full Faith and Credit Act of 2013.

It’s time to abolish the debt ceiling. What seemed like a simple way to consolidate federal debt in 1939 has turned into a yearly crisis that led, in 2011, to the first ever downgrade of the United States’ credit rating.

The House majority needs to responsibly agree to pay for the legislation they pass without threatening to wreck the economy if they can’t renegotiate the budget they’ve already approved for the year.

The American people are tired of having our futures held hostage to one manufactured crisis after another. The House majority needs to stop wasting everyone’s time and deal with real issues like job creation.

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Life, liberty and health care

by digby

Dave Johnson has a nice piece today about this new Nate Silver analysis which shows that “health care entitlements” are the cause of government deficits and will eventually choke off growth. He points out that Silver is only looking at the numbers but worries that his credibility will lead people to conclude that we must, therefore, cut government spending on health care. And unlike most others, he points to the analytic process which leads to this problem: the “manager” effect, also known as technocratic governance.

[T]oo many people who are looking at the government’s budget problem from a background of being “managers” just don’t look at the bigger picture of what happens in the whole economy. They only see the problem of the government’s budgets and only think about how to fix that problem.

So if the problem is that health care costs are going up in the federal budget, a manager of the federal budget will want to fix that by cutting costs – providing less health care to people, and other things that lower the costs in that budget. They are not looking at the underlying causes. They are not going to look at what their solution does elsewhere. That’s not the problem they are looking at.

The bigger picture, of course, is that providing less health care only means people have to go elsewhere (or nowhere), which has terrible effects on the people — and ultimately on the economy. When people are hurt by this, that’s not the manager’s problem to solve. And when the economy is hurt government revenues are hurt, and budget deficits get worse — and that’s not the manager’s problem to solve, either.

A manager perspective means you only care about the problem in this one area, so they say we have to “reduce government spending” in the budget as you see it today, without understanding that only means shifting it onto the private sector, which just makes everything worse, including the long-term budget picture because of reduced future revenues. (And, again, hurts people.)

Now a slimy con man like Paul Ryan will say that the private market will solve all of this by making 82 year-olds shop for cheaper open heart surgery so we’ll have the magic of competition to bring down costs. I think all but the most deluded ideologues know that’s not going to work. So what we have left is plain and simple rationing unless the government makes a much bigger role in reining in health care costs.

And as Dave Says:

Fortunately, it looks like this rise in medical spending might be starting to get under control. The real answer for the bigger picture is, of course, Medicare-for-All.

And by the way, “health care entitlements” is a really loaded phrase. On it’s face, it makes perfect sense. Yes, citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth should be “entitled” to health care, just as they should be “entitled” to food to eat or air to breathe. Unfortunately, the right has succeeded in making it a pejorative term that suggests these things are unearned or somehow unaffordable luxury items to which only those of means have a claim.

Health care falls into the category of being “entitled” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and any suggestions that it’s unaffordable is sheer nonsense. Of course it’s affordable. Any nation in which you can go into a store and buy 50 different kinds of mascara and little schoolchildren have their own computers can afford to take care of its vulnerable and sick. It’s a choice.

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Factoid ‘o the day: gun deaths

by digby

Mark Shields told host Judy Woodruff, “You know, Judy, the reality is — and it’s a terrible reality — since Robert Kennedy died in the Ambassador Hotel on June 4, 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country’s history, from the Revolutionary through the Civil War, World War I, World War II, in those 43 years. … I mean, guns are a problem. And I think they still have to be confronted.”

Politifact looked it up:

Is the death toll that high? Let’s examine each half of his comparison.

The NRA and Breitbart: Unprecedented Epistemic Closure in Action

by David Atkins

When honest pundits try to piece together what happened to the American Right, one of the phrases that tends to get bandied about is “epistemic closure“, which is a really fancy way of saying that everyone on the Right gets their information from everyone else on the Right, with none of them leaving their information cocoon to see or care whether their information plays well with the broader public or is even accurate.

To make a complicated and long story short, the Right’s epistemic closure was a product of believing that every mainstream news and entertainment source leaned significantly to the left. That mid-20th century belief progressed steadily into the notion that mainstream news and information sources were not only biased, but in fact overt propaganda tools of the left. These beliefs thus required a “fair and balanced” propaganda arm of the Right, filled with newspapers, cable news channels and other media outlets of their own. And since CNN and the New York Times seemed to be good enough information sources to be credible for most of America, why then shouldn’t conservative versions like the Washington Times and Fox News be equally credible? Let the two propaganda circles compete for adherents, it was thought.

Tactically it worked well, at least for a while. But it was based on two tragically flawed assumptions: 1) that most mainstream news sources were abject propaganda tools of the Left (or even leaned left at all in most cases), and 2) that objective truth no longer mattered in a postmodern media environment. Both of these assumptions far overstated the case.

It turns out that while many Americans are indeed blinkered by pure propaganda, there is gracefully still a measure of objective truth that does seep through from time to time. And since the mainstream press isn’t in fact a pure propaganda arm of the left, it actually does manage to take and respond to the pulse of the mainstream public at least every so often.

All of this means that the American Right is subject to some very embarrassing moments of sheer disconnect from both the public and from the truth. Nowhere has this become more obvious than in the fiasco of the NRA’s latest ad. The ad blasts the President for opposing armed guards in every school even though his daughters (and David Gregory’s children) supposedly attend a school with armed guards.

The only problem? There are no armed guards at the school. In fact, it’s a Quaker school with a dedication to nonviolence. The President’s daughters have a secret service detail as required by law, but there are no general armed guards at the school.

How did the NRA get wrong this basic fact on which they based such an expensive and foolish debacle? Amazingly, from a fraudulent piece posted by a “reporter” at notoriously extremist and inaccurate rightwing blog Breitbart.com.

A.W.R. Hawkins of Breitbart reported (entirely inaccurately) that:

Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact.
The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak.

If you dismiss this by saying, “Of course they have armed guards — they get Secret Service protection,” then you’ve missed the larger point.

The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC’s David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren’t used (and weren’t even allowed).

Now, it’s one thing to get information from sources that confirm your ideological beliefs. It happens to the most circumspect of us, and sometimes we bloggers relay false information that “seems” right and then are forced to retract. If we do it more than very occasionally, we begin to lose credibility. So even unpaid bloggers, if they’re any good, will do a little research to confirm what they’ve read lest they lose their audience. If they’re shown to be wrong, they’ll post an update with an apology and/or retraction. And they’ll do this level of research even if they’re churning out several posts a day at whirlwind speed.

But for a national organization like the NRA to have invested this much organizational time, money and energy into an ad campaign based on false information from a widely discredited source, without doing even the first steps to confirm the information that is the entire basis for the attack? That is inexcusable solipsism and epistemic closure of the first order. It’s an example of the phenomenon that eclipses any other that I’m aware of. Sure, a lawmaker here or there has stood up and made a dumb statement based on misinformation. When they do, the press has a good laugh and there’s a way of shutting that whole thing down.

But I believe this is the most significant example of an entire organization making such an egregious and expensive error on their primary talking point with plenty of time to do their research. That no one individual at the NRA ever stopped to check on their primary source is simply stunning.

It shows just how far the Right has sunk, and how difficult it will be for them to make the climb back into the open air of reality.

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A recent history of jackboot rhetoric

by digby

I love this story at Mother Jones about how Reagan and the NRA killed the ATF:

To understand how the ATF became the weakest of law enforcement agencies, you have to go back to President Ronald Reagan’s first term.

The 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, the first major piece of gun control legislation since the Capone days, led the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax Division of the Department of the Treasury to sprout a third responsibility: handguns. With the market for moonshine collapsed—due to a global spike in sugar prices—the division’s primary investigative responsibility for most of its history withered. The new mandate to regulate arms sales filled the void. It also made the bureau a natural foil for the nascent gun lobby, and the NRA, whose leadership was fast transitioning from a moderate coalition of sportsmen to a band of true believers, went to work to make the agency a pariah.

Republicans and Democrats alike hammered the agency for years. Appearing in a 1981 NRA-produced film, Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) charged, “If I were to select a jackbooted group of fascists who are perhaps as large a danger to American society as I could pick today, I would pick BATF.” A 1982 Senate report blasted the agency’s supposed “practically reprehensible” enforcement tactics.

Leading the charge was Reagan. On the campaign trail, he’d bashed the ATF and vowed to dissolve it. Once in Washington, Reagan, with the NRA’s backing, proposed folding the ATF into the Secret Service—the two branches of the Treasury most unlike all the others. ATF agents would help the Secret Service handle its beefed-up responsibilities of campaign years and expand its investigative powers. It would have been a death sentence for the bureau.

But then the NRA had had a change of heart. The organization’s strategists came to worry that if gun law enforcement was handed to the Secret Service, one of the few federal agencies with a reputation for competence, gun owners might actually have something to fear. And, they feared, that if the agency did become part of the Secret Service, they’d lose an easy target.

The NRA realized, “‘Oh my God, we’re gonna lose the ATF!'” recalls William Vizzard, a professor of criminology at California State University-Sacramento, who worked for bureau at the time. “It would have been like removing the Soviets during the Cold War, for the Defense Department—there’s nobody to point to.”

Working in conjunction with the liquor lobby (which had its own misgivings about suddenly being regulated by the Customs Service), the NRA coaxed a friendly lawmaker, Sen. James Abdnor (R-S.D.), into scuttling the merger by inserting language in a budget bill. As Vizzard puts it, “If it weren’t for the NRA and the liquor industry, there would be no ATF today, because the merger with the Secret Service would have just gone ahead.”

Once the NRA had saved the ATF, it focused on how to neuter it. Four years after bargaining for the preservation of the ATF, the NRA helped Congress formally handcuff the agency, in the form of the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act. The law, which included a handful of token regulations (such as a ban on machine guns), made it all but impossible for the government to prosecute corrupt gun dealers. It prohibited the bureau from compiling a national database of retail firearm sales, reduced the penalty for dealers who falsified sales records from a felony to a misdemeanor, and raised the threshold for prosecution for unlicensed dealing.

Perhaps most glaringly, the ATF was explicitly prohibited from conducting more than one inspection of a single dealer in a given year, meaning that once an agent had visited a shop, that dealer was free to flout the law.

Those restrictions haven’t changed over the last two decades. “There’s no other law enforcement entity in the country that has any restriction remotely like that,” says Jon Lowy, the director of the legal action project at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The only time I ever heard any of those Liberty Lovers complain about jack-booted thugs was when they complained about the ATF (and sometimes the FBI if it was investigating militia’s or some such.) But they did it enough that the silly libertarians got it in their heads that these guys were kindred spirits, when in fact they never met a drug law or a government investigation of political crimes they didn’t like. But when it came to guns these guys basically used every trick in the book to defang the ATF and perpetuate a scare campaign that people needed to buy more and more guns to fight off the “jack booted thugs” who were coming for them. And the firearms manufacturers thanked them generously. (This is why I find the Fast and Furious “scandal” so hilarious. After years and years of demonizing the ATF for being a bunch of gun control fascists, these same people are criticizing the ATF for failing to properly control guns. You just can’t win with these people.)

But it is important to look back at this history in order to understand why so many politicians ended up throwing up their hands and walking away from the issue. This was a bipartisan effort spearheaded by some people who know from fascism and weren’t afraid to intimidate. Unfortunately, it turned our country into a shooting gallery.

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