Month: March 2014

Happiness on a scale of one to ten

by digby

At least we hit the Top 20 in this one:

The happiest countries in the world are all in Northern Europe (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Netherlands). Their average life evaluation score is 7.6 on a 0-to-10 scale. The least happy countries are all poor countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Togo, Benin, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone) with average life evaluation scores of 3.4. But it is not just wealth that makes people happy: Political freedom, strong social networks and an absence of corruption are together more important than income in explaining well-being differences between the top and bottom countries. At the individual level, good mental and physical health, someone to count on, job security and stable families are crucial.
[…]

The report shows that, where happiness is measured by how happy people are with their lives:

Happier countries tend to be richer countries. But more important for happiness than income are social factors like the strength of social support, the absence of corruption and the degree of personal freedom.

Over time as living standards have risen, happiness has increased in some countries, but not in others (like for example, the United States). On average, the world has become a little happier in the last 30 years (by 0.14 times the standard deviation of happiness around the world).

Unemployment causes as much unhappiness as bereavement or separation. At work, job security and good relationships do more for job satisfaction than high pay and convenient hours.

Behaving well makes people happier.

Mental health is the biggest single factor affecting happiness in any country. Yet only a quarter of mentally ill people get treatment for their condition in advanced countries and fewer in poorer countries. 

Stable family life and enduring marriages are important for the happiness of parents and children. 

In advanced countries, women are happier than men, while the position in poorer countries is mixed. 

Happiness is lowest in middle age.

As case studies, the report describes in detail how happiness is measured in Bhutan and the United Kingdom, and it lays out how the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development plans to promote standard methods of data collection in different countries. The report itself proposes two evaluative questions that should be asked by social surveys of representative populations in all countries:

Taking all things together, how happy would you say you are? (where 0 means extremely unhappy, and 10 means extremely happy)

All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole nowadays? (where 0 means extremely dissatisfied and 10 means extremely satisfied.)

I have my suspicions about why America is not in the Top 10 despite the fact that it’s very wealthy and basically runs the world. (That latter may actually be part of the reason why its people aren’t deliriously happy.) But you can come to your own conclusions.

I think this song expresses our very special American form of happiness the best:

If you’re in the mood for something completely different take a look at this fascinating Josh Holland interview with Clair Brown on the subject of “Buddhist Economics”, wherein happiness plays a major role. (Of course, what Buddhists consider happiness may be different from what you consider happiness ….)

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The economic populism Third Way fears is what works in conservative districts

by David Atkins

DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas and the execrable Third Way are in a minor media tussle at the moment. Markos correctly pointed out that in both the House and Senate, the Democratic caucus has shifted significantly to the left over the last 10 years with the defeats of many conservative Democrats. The usual Third Way flacks Bennett and Kessler were given a megaphone to respond in Politico magazine that those conservative Democrats usually lost seats not to progressives, but to Republicans.

It’s a fair point, but Markos has far the better of the argument. The issue is clouded by the specter of the 2010 redistricting and subsequent GOP gerrymandering, which made many House seats held by conservative Democrats unwinnable for either Blue Dogs or progressives. Bennett and Kessler would have readers believe that only an embrace of conservative Democrats and their policies will enable the Party to take the House back from Republicans.

But curiously, Bennett and Kessler also make the contradictory argument that the Conservadems aren’t much different from their progressive counterparts:

Democrats across the spectrum agree on far more than we disagree—almost all supported President Obama’s key initiatives, including universal health care and fundamental immigration reform. Most support new gun safety laws, marriage for gay couples and a vigorous federal response to climate change. Yet for some, that’s not pure enough.

That seems like a reasonable point. But it isn’t. It’s not what Kessler and Bennett say that is revealing, but what they leave out.

If the conservadems are such good friends of progressive policy, what then is the difference between them and the dreaded “liberals?” It’s clearly not social issues: as they say, most modern conservadems support the Affordable Care Act, gun control efforts, marriage equality and climate change activism.

The difference is on core economics. It’s about the attitude toward the economic elites, the top 1%, Wall Street and the other wealth hoarders in corporate America. It’s not Elizabeth Warren’s or Barbara Boxer’s stances on climate change, guns or reproductive choice that cause Third Way so much anguish. It’s their stance on who is a producer in today’s economy, and who is a parasite.

And this is where the Third Way argument utterly falls apart. Because the thing about Elizabeth Warren’s form of economic populism and anti-Wall Street sentiment is that it’s the most popular piece of the Democratic agenda.

In the conservative areas of the country where Kessler and Bennett claim to be most concerned about Democratic chances of victory, it isn’t the issues that sit underneath their proposed Big Tent that will carry the day, but rather the ones that they fear. In tough-to-win conservative districts there is heavy skepticism of climate change, distrust of the Affordable Care Act, and often outright hostility to immigration reform, gun control and marriage equality. If an “impure” Democrat must be allowed into the Big Tent in order to win enough seats to control Congress, then it should be on one or more of those issues that they should differ with the broader Democratic caucus.

Attacking Wall Street, on the other hand, is excellent politics in conservative districts. Hammering against unrestricted bailouts and cocaine-freebasing, prostitute-expensing billionaire vulture capitalists in Manhattan makes for a compelling argument in rural Missouri. Taking broadsides against outsourcing, Cayman Islands tax havens and corporate welfare queens is a superb strategy in suburban Colorado. It was Democrats who ran on these and similar campaign themes who won against the odds in 2012. Most Americans, including in conservative districts, are strongly in favor of reducing income inequality, raising the minimum wage and extending unemployment benefits. Yes, they’re also concerned about deficits in part because the Third Way coalition of Democrats helped the public believe that deficit hysteria is a bipartisan feeling. But if you ask swing voters whether they would rather close the deficit by cutting Social Security and unemployment benefits, or by raising taxes on billionaires and on Wall Street, the answers are clear.

The “liberalism” that Third Way fears is the very economic populist campaign platform that will send Democrats to victory in conservative districts if they embrace it. The issues that Third Way celebrates as uniting the conservadems and progressives in the Big Tent are ironically the ones that, while noble and necessary public policy, could end up costing some of our candidates electoral victory.

One could say that Third Way is simply a victim of the neoliberal propaganda that has poisoned the Democratic Party for the last few decades. But that wouldn’t be accurate. In Third Way’s case, one need only follow the money:

Economic populism isn’t just good policy. It’s also good politics–including and especially in conservative districts. Wall Street’s enablers in the Third Way are simply blowing smoke to protect the interests of their funders.

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Ah memories

by digby

People thought this was a good speech as I recall. Very stirring:

“My fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

“On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.

“More than 35 countries are giving crucial support from the use of naval and air bases to help with intelligence and logistics to deployment of combat units.

“Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honour of serving in our common defence.

“To all the men and women of the United States armed forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you. That trust is well placed.

“The enemies you confront will come to know your skill and bravery. The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military.

“In this conflict America faces an enemy that has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality.

“Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military. A final atrocity against his people.

“I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm.

“A campaign on the harsh terrain of the nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict and helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment.

“We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilisation and for the religious faiths they practise.

“We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.

“I know that the families of our military are praying that all those who serve will return safely and soon.

“Millions of Americans are praying with you for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent.

“For your sacrifice you have the gratitude and respect of the American people and you can know that our forces will be coming home as soon as their work is done.

“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.

“We will meet that threat now with our army, air force, navy, coastguard and marines so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

“Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force and I assure you this will not be a campaign of half measures and we will accept no outcome but victory.

“My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.

“May God bless our country and all who defend her.”

It’s interesting to look at the polling in the immediate days before the invasion. A majority was in favor of the war and not because they thought it would prevent terrorism. In fact, people assumed it would increase the threat for Americans.

It appeared that most people just thought it made sense to invade because of the weapons of mass destruction. It was a tremendously successful con job.

And years later, the Villagers enjoyed the joke tremendously:

From the “always been wrong about everything files”

by digby

 Jon Schwarz does the honors.  It appears the David Frum is dispensing neoconservative “wisdom” about foreign policy again:

[T]en years later, David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined the term “axis of evil,” still cannot get the most basic fucking facts right about this:

The main reason that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program dwindled away after 1996 was that Saddam had run short of money with oil prices falling to $20 a barrel and less.

Here’s what the CIA says on its website:

Saddam Husayn ended the nuclear program in 1991 following the Gulf war. ISG found no evidence to suggest concerted efforts to restart the program…

Iraq did not possess a nuclear device, nor had it tried to reconstitute a capability to produce nuclear weapons after 1991…

What I appreciate most about this is that Frum isn’t just wrong. If you read the rest of that paragraph about Iraq and nuclear weapons, you’ll see he takes his wrong foundation and then, totally confident in his sophisticated knowledge of this subject, builds an entire mansion of wrong self-justification on top of it.

The problem is that it doesn’t matter. He’s a Very Serious Person and will always be taken Very Seriously.

It’s going to be hard to solve climate without solving middle-class economics first 

by David Atkins

There’s a depressing Pew poll out among Democrats regarding the Keystone XL Pipeline. The topline number is that 49% of Democrats support building the pipeline, while 38% oppose. It’s going to be hard to convince politicians to do the right thing when when a clear majority of even the party’s base is going the wrong direction.

But even more salient than the topline numbers are the education and income splits:

Essentially, if you are a highly educated Democrat, you know enough about the consequences of climate change that you’re likely to oppose the pipeline. If you are a wealthy Democrat, the jobs argument for building the pipeline is less likely to motivate you.

Democrats with with less income and education are either less aware of the climate consequences, or feel strongly enough about the potential job creation elements that climate concerns are overrided. And, of course, that’s just Democrats. This dynamic is even stronger among independents and Republicans.

Unless climate activists are banking on a miracle breakthrough in renewable technology and a massive government green jobs program, it’s going to be difficult to get much of anything done on climate without alleviating the economic pressures of the middle class.

As long as oil/gas extraction remains one of the few non-finance private sectors of the economy that can provide reliable jobs, policies that hinder the oil and gas industry are going to remain very tough sells.

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“Going to war, almost light”

by digby

Greg Mitchell had a nice piece this morning revisiting a Bill Moyers’ Journal about the media’s role in the run up to the Iraq war. It’s a good time to take another look back, I think. Mitchell recapped the show at the time of the airing this way:

Among the few heroes of this devastating film are reporters with the Knight Ridder/McClatchy bureau in D.C. Tragically late, Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN, observes, “The people at Knight Ridder were calling the colonels and the lieutenants and the people in the CIA and finding out, you know, that the intelligence is not very good. We should’ve all been doing that.”

At the close, Moyers mentions some of the chief proponents of the war who refused to speak to him for this program, including Thomas Friedman, Bill Kristol, Roger Ailes, Charles Krauthammer, Judith Miller, and William Safire. But Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor, admits, “I don’t think there is any excuse for, you know, my performance and the performance of the press in general in the roll up to the war. We didn’t dig enough. And we shouldn’t have been fooled in this way.”

Bob Simon, who had strong doubts about evidence for war, was asked by Moyers if he pushed any of the top brass at CBS to “dig deeper,” and he replies, “No, in all honesty, with a thousand mea culpas, I don’t think we followed up on this.” Instead he covered the marketing of the war in a “softer” way, explaining to Moyers: “I think we all felt from the beginning that to deal with a subject as explosive as this, we should keep it, in a way, almost light—if that doesn’t seem ridiculous.”

Moyers replies: “Going to war, almost light.”

Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, “We didn’t question our sources enough.” But why? Isaacson notes there was “almost a patriotism police” after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and “big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’”

Moyers then mentions that Isaacson had sent a memo to staff, leaked to the Washington Post, in which he declared, “It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan” and ordered them to balance any such images with reminders of 9/11. Moyers also asserts that editors at the Panama City (Fla.) News-Herald received an order from above, “Do not use photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties. Our sister paper has done so and received hundreds and hundreds of threatening emails.”

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post explains that even at his paper reporters “do worry about sort of getting out ahead of something.” But Moyers gives credit to my old friend, Charles J. Hanley of The Associated Press, for trying, in vain, to draw more attention to United Nations inspectors failing to find WMD in early 2003.

The disgraceful press reaction to Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations seems like something out of Monty Python, with one key British report cited by Powell being nothing more than a student’s thesis, downloaded from the Web—with the student later threatening to charge U.S. officials with “plagiarism.”

It’s important to remind ourselves of those days, not only because we are at the anniversary of the invasion but because we are seeing many of the usual suspects once again get overstimulated and seemingly desperate to “take action”, regardless of the consequences or the obvious complications.

And the endless moral preening about the sanctity of international law is almost unbearable. Especially considering the past. (And not just Iraq.)

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Can’t we all just have breakfast together?

by digby

I get the appeal of this as a political anecdote, but hope it isn’t HRC’s true assessment of how Congress works: pic.twitter.com/GyQYKC85yK
— George Zornick (@gzornick) March 19, 2014

Actually it is how congress works. You get together with right wing ideologues and make deals that hurt your own voters. And then, if things go really well, they impeach you.

Inhofe as chairman is a selling point?

by digby

I know there’s not a dime’s worth of difference and all that. But this still seems like a very bad idea:

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe said Tuesday he will again head the Senate committee overseeing transportation and environmental regulation if Republicans win control of the upper chamber in November.

Speaking to about 50 plant managers and others associated with Tulsa Port of Catoosa tenants, Inhofe said a Republican victory would make him chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

EPW oversees the Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for operating and maintaining the McClellan Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System. It is also responsible for the Environmental Protection Agency, which is a frequent target of Inhofe’s wrath.

So what’s the problem?

Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous. — Senator James Inhofe

I’m sure he’s sincere in his superstition. But a little extra incentive couldn’t hurt:

In the interview, Inhofe did not mention he has received $1,352,523 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $90,950 from Koch Industries.

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Cruel and inhuman

by digby

This is so awful it’s hard for me to even read about it:

Rennie Gibbs’s daughter, Samiya, was a month premature when she simultaneously entered the world and left it, never taking a breath. To experts who later examined the medical record, the stillborn infant’s most likely cause of death was also the most obvious: the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.

But within days of Samiya’s delivery in November 2006, Steven Hayne, Mississippi’s de facto medical examiner at the time, came to a different conclusion. Autopsy tests had turned up traces of a cocaine byproduct in Samiya’s blood, and Hayne declared her death a homicide, caused by “cocaine toxicity.”

In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for “depraved heart murder” — defined under Mississippi law as an act “eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.” By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously” caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison.

Seven years and much legal wrangling later, Gibbs could finally go on trial this spring — part of a wave of “fetal harm” cases across the country in recent years that pit the rights of the mother against what lawmakers, health care workers, prosecutors, judges, jurors, and others view as the rights of the unborn child.

This lifeless fetus was delivered with its umbilical cord around its neck. Unless the theory is that the cocaine fueled fetus committed suicide it’s hard to see how this could possibly even be a legal case. But it is. And it’s a perfect illustration of yet another anti-abortion legal tentacle designed to make a woman’s civic status and bodily autonomy secondary to a gestating fetus. They could, after all, just charge her with smoking crack cocaine, a “crime” which she commits against herself. But in these people’s minds, when a woman is pregnant, she ceases to exist except as a body which houses and feeds the growing fetus.

Slippery slope arguments are fairly cheap most of the time, but in these legal situations they must be addressed because the law depends on the application of logic and principle. In a country in which abortion is ostensibly legal these cases around the country in which women are being charged with murder for allegedly killing their fetuses with acts of harming (what they thought of) as themselves are bizarre and very troubling. If it continues in this direction, we will see a legal basis for declaring pregnant women guilty of negligence for failing to properly follow doctors orders or being overweight or physical risk or any number of other claims which could be made against them for failing to be proper guardians of their potential offspring while it is still inside their bodies. The lines they are trying to draw on this are far too indistinct for something as blunt as the legal system to competently judge.

These cases should point out the complexity of this situation. But for many people it remains simple: a fertile woman doesn’t own her own body. A fetus could be inside it and, being innocent of any wrongdoing, it would always have a superior claim. That’s a problem.

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Larry Summers is wrong. It’s not about the top incomes versus the bottom. It’s the top versus everyone else

by David Atkins

This Politico article highlighting Home Depot founder Ken Lagone’s latest foolishness comparing class consciousness rhetoric to Nazism is getting some decent attention. But there’s one particular quote in it from our old friend Larry Summers that requires special examination:

“Reducing inequality is good, but it’s 50 times better to do it by lifting those up who are low than by tearing those down who are high,” said Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary whose bid to become Fed chair got derailed by the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party. “The politics of envy are the wrong politics in America. The better politics are the politics of inclusion where everyone shares in economic growth.”

This, perfectly encapsulated, is everything that is wrong with the neoliberalism and the upper echelons of Democratic Party politics today.

People like Larry Summers have an ingrained belief that life is pretty good for most Americans, and that all we need do is expand social equality while ensuring a basic safety net for “those who are low.” That is a convenient fiction for men as wealthy as Summers.

In reality, the American middle class is struggling badly. Most who aren’t in the top 10% of American incomes–and even many of those who are–are seeing their standards of living decline.

90% of Americans are working longer hours than ever before, with less job security than ever before. Staggering numbers of Americans are underemployed in jobs they hate. The costs of education, healthcare, childcare, housing and retirement are rising rapidly. Entire industries are disappearing almost overnight due to mechanization, outsourcing deskilling and flattening of the labor market.

People are scared and angry. They have every right to be. The top 1% of incomes are taking greater and greater shares of the wealth as everyone else stagnates or falls into decline.

Functionally speaking, there is no way for everyone to share more in economic growth without taking back some of the ill-gotten wealth being hoarded by the top 1%. As Piketty’s recent book demonstrates, letting inequality continue to spiral out of control is bad not just for the social fabric, but even for raw economic growth. That’s not the politics of envy talking. That’s basic economics and common sense.

But Summers’ rhetoric is all too typical of the neoliberal error that has helped to seriously damage the Democratic Party’s brand. As I said a couple of weeks ago:

Not surprisingly, the Left responded to this by cozying up to moneyed power and by shifting its focus away from questioning the assumptions of the flawed capitalist pseudo-meritocracy, and toward attempting to expand access to that meritocracy to everyone. That shift allowed the Left to hold together its social coalitions while maintaining access and influence to big money donors. The “era of big government was over.” Trade protections for workers, regulations on the financial industry, and taxes on the wealthy were all eliminated by bipartisan consent. The left, meanwhile, became singularly focused on social issues and on making sure that the poorest Americans didn’t suffer too badly in the brave new plutocracy.

And thus was born the “New Left” whose organizing principle is that society will be perfected when even a transgendered racial and religious minority can also become a plutocrat or head of state, so long as not too many people are dying on the street without access to food or healthcare. Toward that end, the New Left focused on electing politicians who would in turn appoint judges to help that withered vision become a reality.

As an organizing principle in a world of Rightist economic dominance, it’s not completely terrible. But it’s a guaranteed loser in the present as well as the near and long-term future.

The middle classes in industrialized countries are collapsing worldwide as the plutonomy grows ever more unequal. Households that already pushed women into the workforce to make up for wage deflation and inflation in housing costs no longer have anywhere to turn, except toward the sorts of multi-generational arrangements usually seen in less developed economies. The cost of both housing and education has skyrocketed to the point that younger generations have been basically squeezed out of the economy entirely even as older generations desperately cling to the remaining assets and social insurance they have. Technological change is causing entire industries to disappear almost overnight, with very few jobs to replace them–a trend that is rapidly accelerating.

The result of all of this negative change is a population that is appropriately scared, desperate, and angry. Both the poor and the middle class feel threatened and increasingly pessimistic. Opinions of elite institutions across the board are at an all time low. Whether on the right or left, few believe anymore that anyone in government, business, or politics is actually looking out for their interests. In a world like this, the move to ensure that every single individual in society has an equal, infinitesimal chance to become obscenely rich loses its moral force. The rhetoric around “making sure that no one is left behind” in starvation and penury is far less compelling when the entire middle class feels like it’s being left behind.

If the Democratic Party wants to remain a vibrant force in an increasingly desperate future, it will turn away from the likes of Larry Summers and embrace the more populist rhetoric of Elizabeth Warren and Bill DeBlasio. It’s not just good politics and good morals. It’s good economics, too.

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