Month: February 2015

FCC Chair Wheeler: I Want to Regulate the Whole Internet As a Utility

by Gaius Publius

In a dramatic statement, issued through Wired magazine, FCC Chairman (and former telecom lobbyist) Tom Wheeler has “fully” endorsed reclassifying the Internet as a common carrier under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. In other words, the Internet, all of it, will be regulated as a “utility,” the way your phone service is.

Wheeler’s piece opens with a fascinating story in which he tells his own (bad) experience as a fledgling Internet provider dealing with the lock-out policies of cable providers — while Steve Case, the founder of what would become AOL, was successfully selling a similar, but much inferior product using common-carrier–protected phone lines. That part is not just interesting; it makes what follows entirely credible.

Then Wheeler writes this:

Originally, I believed that the FCC could assure internet openness through a determination of “commercial reasonableness” under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While a recent court decision seemed to draw a roadmap for using this approach, I became concerned that this relatively new concept might, down the road, be interpreted to mean what is reasonable for commercial interests, not consumers.

That is why I am proposing that the FCC use its Title II [“common carrier”] authority to implement and enforce open internet protections.

Using this authority, I am submitting to my colleagues the strongest open internet protections ever proposed by the FCC. These enforceable, bright-line rules will ban paid prioritization, and the blocking and throttling of lawful content and services. I propose to fully apply—for the first time ever—those bright-line rules to mobile broadband. My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission.

All the right words, finally.

Words and Deeds

Still, so far just words. The deeds will have to match them. Two pieces for you. One, this from one of the main advocacy groups, Popular Resistance (my emphasis throughout):

Today [February 4] is the day that the FCC announced the rules for net neutrality that will be voted upon at their next meeting on February 26. Together, our work over the past year is the reason that we achieved reclassification of the Internet as a common carrier under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. We are on the verge of a tremendous people powered victory over the telecom industry. We expect more analysis of the actual language to come soon. But for now, we can celebrate that people power conquered the cable industry and welcome net neutrality back. (Here is a fact sheet from the FCC on the proposed rule.)

We agree with Chairman Wheeler that the interests of the telecoms is not always consistent with the public interest. [Yes, Wheeler actually said that.] We urge the Chairman to not compromise with telecoms and Internet providers as this is the opportunity to follow the wishes of the American people and put in place rules that ensure the Internet is free of discrimination.

We are also pleased to see that proposals in Congress for fake net neutrality are not moving forward. Both political parties would be wise to side with the American people, small businesses, Silicon Valley and other Internet-based businesses rather than the telecom companies. The public wants real Net Neutrality.

We look forward to reviewing the final rule but if it is consistent with the statement issued today, we will do all we can to ensure that the telecom’s influence in Congress does not undo rules that provide for real Net Neutrality and preserve the dynamism of the Internet as a democratized form of communication and vehicle for innovation.

So, notes of relief, notes of caution. Reasons for concern are two. One, that Wheeler will weasel in a way that matters. From his statement linked above:

All of this can be accomplished while encouraging investment in broadband networks. To preserve incentives for broadband operators to invest in their networks, my proposal will modernize Title II, tailoring it for the 21st century, in order to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks. For example, there will be no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling. Over the last 21 years, the wireless industry has invested almost $300 billion under similar rules, proving that modernized Title II regulation can encourage investment and competition.

Like Popular Resistance, we’ll have to see what that means. “Returns” means profit. Still, he’s firm and clear on many of the rules he’s proposing, like no throttling, blocking, or “fast lanes.” See page 2 of the FCC’s Fact Sheet (pdf) for that. Page 3 talks about “Forbearance,” Title II regulations that won’t apply, which is where we could get some take-back.

Industry Reaction

The second note of concern is Congress and its (bought-and-paid) attempt to block this move. As you read above in the Popular Resistance statement, industry shills in Congress (is it really just Republicans?) are working to prevent this reclassification. The latest attempt is a set of bills before the House and Senate introduced by Sen. John Thune and Rep. Fred Upton. The analysis is here. In essence, these bills neuter both the public Internet and the FCC’s ability to regulate it.

But according to Politico:

[Sen. John] Thune told MT on Tuesday [February 3] that it’s “unlikely” that the Republican draft net neutrality bill will move forward before the FCC votes on Wheeler’s net neutrality proposal later this month. There “probably” won’t be a markup of the bill “any time soon,” he said, adding that he’s still trying to get Democrats to support the bill.

Plus, Harry Reid is on the side of the angels on this one. So far, so good on that front. By the way, get ready for more of this from the heavy manipulators of the right-wing thought machine:

There’s a debate raging about how the FCC should regulate the Internet. Some advocates are pushing for “Title II.” That’s code for 1930s-style utility regulation. Title II would put the FCC squarely in the middle of the Internet — right beside the NSA. It saddles the Internet with price controls and other heavy-handed rules from a thankfully long-gone era. The debate over Title II isn’t a debate over net neutrality, which is why many net neutrality proponents actually oppose Title II. Instead, it’s a debate between a vocal minority that wants greater government control over broadband companies, and defenders of a bipartisan consensus around a “Hands Off the Internet” approach. …

Drivel. Focus-tested. Industry-bought. But that’s where they’re headed. (About that “bipartisan consensus,” I know it exists. I’d love to have the names of any elected Democrat who signs onto this pushback.)

The Ruling Will Apply Very Broadly

What’s striking (and certain) about this proposal is how sweeping it is. At least in the main, nothing is being finessed. From the FCC Fact Sheet again:

First, the Chairman’s proposal would reclassify “broadband Internet access service”—that’s the retail broadband service Americans buy from cable, phone, and wireless providers—as a telecommunications service under Title II. We believe that this step addresses any limitations that past classification decisions placed on our ability to adopt strong Open Internet rules, as interpreted by the D.C. Circuit in the Verizon case last year. But just in case, we also make clear that if a court finds that it is necessary to classify the service that broadband providers make available to “edge providers,” it too is a Title II telecommunications service. (To be clear, this is not a “hybrid”— both the service to the end user and to the edge provider are classified under Title II.)

Nice. Not much weasel there. The Verge comments on this as well:

The biggest revelation from the proposal is the decision to lump wireless networks in with wired broadband, something the FCC has avoided doing for years thanks to enormous pressure from Verizon and AT&T. “I propose to fully apply — for the first time ever — those bright-line rules to mobile broadband,” Wheeler wrote. “My proposal assures the rights of internet users to go where they want, when they want, and the rights of innovators to introduce new products without asking anyone’s permission.” Including wireless providers in the rules is a hugely important move, since we’ve seen that the biggest players have been willing and able to abuse internet openness. AT&T once blocked FaceTime for completely arbitrary reasons, and most recently, T-Mobile has disregarded the principles of net neutrality by giving some music companies special exemptions from data caps.

As near as I can tell, it’s all one and all lumped together — phone lines, cable, mobile devices and cell phone towers, string cheese, whatever. If it gives you the Internet, it’s a common carrier and regulated under Title II, period. Again, so far, so good.

Bottom Line: February 26 Could Be Internet Freedom Day

The time between now and February 26, when the full FCC votes on the rules, will be hugely important. Telecom companies are formidable beasts, giants, with money to spare and to burn. They will not go quietly. The good news is that Obama appears firmly in the good camp (finally!) and other Democrats appear to be holding fire, however much some of them want that good telecom money for themselves. Thune, as you read, is slow-walking his bill, and Reid has not waffled.

Things to watch: The “forbearances” contained in the final language. The vote of the commissioners themselves. The post-decision reaction of the telecoms.

Nevertheless, we’re that close. Finally.

[Update: Corrected typo: Steve Case, not Tom Case.]

GP

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Argument by clickbait
by Tom Sullivan

This morning E.J. Dionne takes on income redistribution as a conservative wedge issue. In particular, Rep. Paul Ryan’s lame attempt to brand non-GOP-approved economic policies as morally suspect with his recent coinage of “envy economics.” To be sure, it’s less insulting than “makers vs. takers.” And it’s more suitable for Sunday morning chat fests than Conrad Hilton III’s “f_cking peasants,” if no more mature. But it’s the thought that counts.

You’ve gotta hand it to the GOP intelligentsia. They seem to have an endless supply-side of these arguments. Dog whistles for the clickbait generation.

Dionne asks, as long as we’re branding opponents’ policies, why not brand Ryan’s “greed economics“?

Ryan’s opening rhetorical bid is unfortunate because there are signs that at least some conservatives (including, sometimes, Ryan himself) seem open to policies that would redistribute income to Americans who have too little of it.

Yes, conservatives and just about everybody else — except, perhaps, for truly austere libertarians — are for redistribution. But almost everyone on the right and many of the more timid Democrats want to deny it. This form of intellectual dishonesty hampers a candid debate about solving the interlocking problems of stagnating wages, rising inequality and declining social mobility.

Ryan attempted over the weekend to paint the president’s economic proposals as unAmerican, unfit for an “aspirational” and “optimistic” people. Besides, they don’t work, according to Ryan. Dionne counters:

Well. Regiments of Republicans claimed that Obama’s policies, and especially Obamacare, would be “job killers.” In the face of 58 straight months of private-sector job growth, will they ever admit their claims were absolutely wrong? Will anyone even ask them? And like them or not, aren’t Obama’s proposals on higher education, child care and pre-kindergarten programs all about aspiration and optimism?

The irony—usually lost on champions of “trickle down” such as Ryan—is that where once he argued that Obama’s policies pitted class against class and would stifle “the job creators,” as Jonathan Weisman observed, now Ryan argues that those same policies have “exacerbated inequality” and made things worse, saying, “The wealthy are doing really well. They’re practicing trickle-down economics now.”

For your enjoyment, found on Pinterest:

Let it go


by digby

Nance suggested that parents of boys should avoid taking their sons to the movies with negative messages about men. 

“We want them to know that they’re essential,” she continued. “We want to encourage masculinity and not villainize masculinity.”

So true. I would encourage parents not to allow their sons to see “American Sniper.” That kind of negative image is absolutely lethal to a healthy masculine ideal. Just say no.

Oh wait … I guess I got that wrong:

“Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy suggested Hollywood is “empowering women by turning our men into fools and villains” during an interview with the head of a conservative activist group on Wednesday morning.

Doocy specifically fretted that “Frozen Fever,” the upcoming sequel to Disney’s 2013 animated hit “Frozen,” would “depict men as evil and cold and bumblers.

This just depresses me. Do these people seriously think  “Frozen” is a bad thing for kids to see? I guess they do.

The work of feminism is far from finished, kids. Don’t let up.

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The long primary

by digby

I think this validates my thesis that 2008’s primary squeaker decided the nominees for the next three presidential elections. I would never have thought that at the time — everything seemed so intense and hostile. But there you have it:

Clinton 2008 vs. Clinton 2016 pic.twitter.com/gIDeWzx1hL
— Daily Kos Elections (@DKElections) February 4, 2015

“Why can’t we go after them harder?”


by digby

I’m seeing a lot of this sort of thing around the interwebs today:

We can. Obama won’t. @David_Gergen: “How much longer will the world permit the brutality of ISIS? Why can’t we go after them harder?”
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) February 4, 2015

I get it. You see monsters doing something horrible like videotaping an execution by immolation and it’s sickening, infuriating. Of course, that’s the point. They are manipulating you. (And, by the way, so are the ratings hungry media who pimp this stuff for hours on end…)

But how exactly do we “go after them harder”? Invade? Nuclear war? What’s the plan?

Here’s what’s happening right now:

Today, the New York Times reported that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) suspended airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in December, “citing fears for its pilots’ safety after a Jordanian pilot was captured.” The article states that the UAE will not participate until U.S. V-22 Osprey aircraft are based in northern Iraq, rather than Kuwait where they reportedly are now, so they can respond faster to execute a combat search-and-rescue operation to recover a downed pilot. The reason those V-22s are not in northern Iraq is that the airbases located there cannot be adequately secured from the potential threats from ISIS rocket, mortar, and small-arms attacks. Raising the overall level of the security of an airbase, including the approach and departure corridors, in order to station such a valuable air asset would require an estimated three to four hundred American troops.

To be completely clear, the UAE is demanding that the United States place its troops at greater risk of being killed—in order to reduce the risks to its own pilots—before it will recommence airstrikes against ISIS. The UAE has two fleets of its own AW109K2 and AW139 combat search-and-rescue helicopters that it could station in Irbil, most likely, with Iraq’s permission. These are less capable than V-22s, but they could be used by the UAE if it wanted to immediately assure the safety of its pilots. Understandably, it would rather pass the risk on to U.S. troops and V-22 pilots.

Sound good? Somehow, I don’t think that’s something on which the American people are too keen.

Read the whole article which explains why these coalitions are always difficult to maintain and how all the incentives are in favor of the countries in the middle east laying off as much as possible on the US and other members of the West. It’s a very difficult problem but unless you are Bill Kristol and openly wish for the US to colonialize the entire middle east (except Israel) it’s a problem with which you have to deal.

I don’t have the answer to this dilemma and I haven’t heard anyone else make much sense about it yet. We are doing too little, and yet it’s also too much. It’s horrible and yet the tools we have are inadequate to fix the problem and trying to use them are liable to to make things worse. So getting really, really mad and “going after them harder” whatever that means, isn’t likely to solve this one.  Wringing your hands on twitter certainly won’t.

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Court dress required, Rand

by digby

I hope Rand Paul doesn’t seriously believe that “freedom” means he doesn’t have to kowtow to his betters. How silly:

Kenneth Vogel and Tarini Parti report for Politico that “some of the most influential players in big-money conservative politics” were put off when Paul showed up at the recent weekend conference of the Koch donor network “wearing a boxy blue blazer, faded jeans and cowboy boots.”

One doesn’t wear blue jeans to address the King. One wears court dress, bows deeply and pulls one’s forelock. Only after you appease the monarchs may you go forth and preach to the people about liberty and tyranny.

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QOTD: President Obama

by digby

This is from David Axelrod’s new book, about Romney’s concession speech on election night 2012:

“‘You really did a great job of getting out the vote in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee,’ in other words, black people. That’s what he thinks this was all about,” Obama said after he hung up with Romney.

Of course he did.  It’s not the first time we’ve heard this sort of thing from him, is it?

Mitt Romney told donors Wednesday he blamed last week’s loss to President Barack Obama in part to “gifts” the Obama administration gave to key voter blocs, including African Americans, Hispanics and young women, according to media reports.

“The president’s campaign focused on giving targeted groups a big gift — so he made a big effort on small things. Those small things, by the way, add up to trillions of dollars,” Romney said on a conference call with donors, the Los Angeles Times first reported.

The “gifts,” according to Romney, included forgiving college loan interest, free contraceptive coverage and the part of Obamacare that allows people 26 and younger to be covered under their parents’ health care plans.

“You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free healthcare, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free healthcare worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity. I mean, this is huge,” Romney said, the New York Times reported.

“Likewise with Hispanic voters, free healthcare was a big plus,” Romney added. “But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group.”

Romney told the donors he was “sorry” about the results.

The 47% remark was pretty much the same thing.

Romney sees the government subsidising some of the cost of health care for someone making $25,000 a year as a “gift.” But the government creating a “retirement” program that also allows these donors to shelter hundreds of millions of dollars from taxes is just good policy. After all, what do politicians have to gain from giving out massive monetary handouts to very rich people? Oh wait  …

If you watched the documentary about the Romney campaign it was clear that Romney believes that the only reason most people vote for Democrats is because they are lazy moochers looking for a handout. And there’s more than a little bit of old fashioned “welfare queen” racism involved in that idea as you can see from his concession call to Obama. He’s a Republican through and through and has a lot more in common with the base than they gave him credit for.

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Government dos and don’ts

by digby

So, somebody commented in an email the other day that anti-Vaxxers are the same people who think the NSA shouldn’t be collecting metadata. This is evidently because anyone who mistrusts  government police power is exactly like someone who believes everything they read on the internet.  The founders were a bunch of paranoid loons who wrote the Bill of Rights because they foolishly assumed that human beings abuse their power without some legal restraint. (Where would they get such ideas?)

Most people don’t consider public health to be an abuse of government power. In fact, they think that’s exactly the kind of government task for which we pay our taxes. On the other hand, a lot of people think that the government should prove to a judge that it has probable cause to suspect a person of committing a crime before it collects all of his communications.  Storing everybody’s communications “just in case” is the equivalent of asking the post office to make a copy of every letter and keep it on file just in case the government might want to read someone’s mail some day. Just the fact that the government did this in secret is enough to make reasonable people question its motives.

And to those who keep saying there’s been no case in which the government failed to properly follow the rules:

Fact: NSA has many times abused their authority & broken rules meant to protect privacy http://t.co/J6orWWrn3p #ODNI pic.twitter.com/YX3ALJAzCu
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) February 4, 2015

“The True History of the Origins of Police”

by Gaius Publius

I found the following article, posted at Alternet and written by Sam Mitrani, a history professor at the College of DuPage, absolutely fascinating. We’ve been discussing, in these pages and elsewhere, the behavior of “our” police forces and their frequent mistreatment of citizens, especially the poor, brown and less “deserving.”

The underlying assumption is that the police exists to protect “us,” an idea frequently promoted by the police themselves, whose slogan is usually some variant of this one:

(Notice the U.S. flag incorporated into this example, which adds a note of authoritarianism. The Nixon-era conversion of the U.S. flag from a national patriotic symbol to a dog-whistle call for obedience to authority will be treated later.)

“To protect and serve” — but whom? That’s where the history lesson offered by Professor Mitrani comes in. Let’s start with a time in the U.S. before we had organized city-run police forces. Mitrani:

The True History of the Origins of Police — Protecting and Serving the Masters of Society

The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police.

… Before the 19th century, there were no police forces that we would
recognize as such anywhere in the world. In the northern United States,
there was a system of elected constables and sheriffs, much more
responsible to the population in a very direct way than the police are
today. In the South, the closest thing to a police force was the slave
patrols.

What happened to change this? Capitalism and its dependence on the low-paid physical labor of immigrants, and later of blacks moving north after the Civil War — up the Mississippi through St. Louis to Kansas City and Chicago, and up the eastern seaboard to Washington, New York and Boston, among other places.

Mitrani:

Then, as Northern cities grew and filled with mostly immigrant
wage workers who were physically and socially separated from the ruling
class, the wealthy elite who ran the various municipal governments hired
hundreds and then thousands of armed men to impose order on the new
working-class neighborhoods.

Class conflict
roiled late-19th century American cities like Chicago, which experienced
major strikes and riots in 1867, 1877, 1886 and 1894. In each of these
upheavals, the police attacked strikers with extreme violence. In the
aftermath of these movements, the police increasingly presented
themselves as a thin blue line protecting civilization, by which they
meant bourgeois civilization, from the disorder of the working class. …

“A thin blue line protecting bourgeois civilization from the disorder of the working class.” Sound familiar? As always, of course, the situation evolved, but never strayed from the main purpose (my paragraphing):

Of course, the ruling class did not get everything it wanted. It had to
yield on many points to the immigrant workers it sought to control —
this is why, for instance, municipal governments backed away from trying to stop Sunday drinking and why they hired so many immigrant police
officers, especially the Irish. But despite these concessions,
businessmen organized themselves to make sure the police were
increasingly isolated from democratic control.

The police, meanwhile,
increasingly set themselves off from the population by donning uniforms;
establishing their own rules for hiring, promotion and firing; working
to build a unique esprit de corps; and identifying themselves
with order. And despite complaints about corruption and inefficiency,
they gained more and more support from the ruling class, to the extent
that in Chicago, for instance, businessmen donated money to buy the
police rifles, artillery, Gatling guns and buildings and to establish a
police pension out of their own pockets.

You’re probably stuck on the Gatling guns in the last sentence, but the phrase that caught my eye was the one I bolded: “identifying themselves with order.” There’s your tie to police authoritarianism and the cop authoritarian personality, so much in evidence today among too many police officers (my emphasis):

I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.
By Sunil Dutta
August 19, 2014 

Sunil Dutta, Ph.D., is a 17-year-veteran police officer in Los Angeles.

… Even though it might sound harsh and impolitic, here is the bottom line:
if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a
baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with
me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say
I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my
badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me.

Because, he goes on to explain, “officers are rarely
at fault. When they use force, they are defending their, or the
public’s, safety.”

There’s the sell again: “Defending the public’s safety.” According to Prof. Mitani’s walk through history, there’s a straight line from the immigrant (meaning labor) and racial struggles of the 19th century, which municipal police forces were created to shut down, and today’s police practices in poor, brown and black towns and neighborhoods. The primary goal is now what it always was — to keep the victims of a predatory economy back on their heels and resigned to their place and their labor.

“There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced ‘the law'”

Mitrani again on a key point — what this implies about rule of law:

There was a never a time when the big city police neutrally enforced
“the law” — nor, for that matter, a time when the law itself was
neutral. Throughout the 19th century in the North, the police mostly
arrested people for the vaguely defined “crimes” of disorderly conduct
and vagrancy, which meant that they could target anyone they saw as a
threat to “order.” In the post-bellum South, they enforced white
supremacy and largely arrested black people on trumped-up charges in
order to feed them into convict labor systems.

The violence the
police carried out and their moral separation from those they patrolled
were not the consequences of the brutality of individual officers, but
of policies carefully designed to mold the police into a force that
could use violence to deal with the social problems that accompanied the
development of a wage-labor economy. …

Though
some patrolmen tried to be kind and others were openly brutal, police
violence in the 1880s was not a case of a few bad apples — and neither
is it today.

In the interest of not quoting too much, I cut out a number of his examples in a number of places. Please do read the whole piece; he makes his case quite well.

“The police were created to use violence”

I’ll close with what for me is his main point. This is hard to believe, and hard to grasp, but it’s the only way to make sense of news that comes at us like a train. Chris Hayes could do “killer cop goes free” stories from now till the rest of his life, never run out, and in our hearts, every one of us knows it. There’s an endless supply of “killer cops” and their stories, most hidden from view, never prosecuted unless there’s an outcry, and rarely even then.

So why is there seemingly no way ever to curb the violence of the police? The answer’s in front of us. Because:

The police were created to use violence to reconcile electoral democracy
with industrial capitalism. Today, they are just one part of the
“criminal justice” system that plays the same role. Their basic job is
to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system —
in our society today, disproportionately among poor black people.

Every word a true one. Remember your Dickens, then remember that you can’t have a world owned and harvested by men like David Koch and Jamie Dimon without an enforcement mechanism. I know this is not your TV’s Law and Order vision of the world, but it is the world, and your TV is wrong. Here’s what it looks like when white people resist — same result:

A cop, protected by the “law,” protecting and serving. You can’t see whom he’s protecting (Jamie Dimon couldn’t make it to this U.C. Davis demonstration). But you can see what he’s serving (pepper spray), and to whom. Thanks to Prof. Mitrani for a great and instructive read.

GP

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A zombie faith

by Tom Sullivan

It was kind of stunning, actually, to see the Washington Post’s Michael Gerson invoke “the common good” in a national newspaper, as I mentioned yesterday. Speaking of that sort of thing (like “public trust”) being so gauche and all. Pitting people against each other? Now that’s how you get ahead in politics. At least, for a certain kind of politician.

Long ago, President Lyndon Johnson explained how this conservative schtick works:

If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you.

The Fox News business model, ladies and gentlemen. They’ve just expanded the palette a little.

Regarding pitting people against each other, Michael Hiltzik yesterday looked at how the Republican Congress is dealing with Social Security disability funding — not by solving the problem, but by “intensifying the crisis.” Someone must be punished, and Republicans are pretty sure it’s the Poors, the aged, and the infirm:

In practical terms, the rule change sets up a confrontation over Social Security’s finances by pitting the program’s retirees against its disabled beneficiaries and their dependents. The confrontation is totally unnecessary, because the required reallocation would have minimal effect on the old-age program. The old-age trust fund, which is still growing today and has not yet been tapped, is expected to last at least until 2034; the reallocation would make both the disability and old-age funds solvent until 2033, according to the latest estimates by the Social Security trustees.

The rule change does, however, reflect Republicans’ cherished disdain for disability recipients, whom they love to caricature as malingering layabouts. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) slathered himself in iniquity last month when he told a New Hampshire audience: “Over half the people on disability are either anxious or their back hurts.”

Digby dealt with this at Salon yesterday, noting that at $1,130/mo on average, nobody’s living large on disability. But:

Apparently, even that’s too much. The government needs to crack down on these lazy moochers and put them to work. Back in the day they used to sell pencils and apples on street corners, amirite? And in third world countries you see plenty of horrifically disabled people making a tidy living by begging. They show the kind of gumption we are denying our paraplegics and mentally ill by molly coddling them with a poverty level stipend.

“Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,” the apostle wrote mockingly of false piety, teaching that faith without works is dead. But that zombie faith is much in vogue.

This morning, Stephen Richter examines the need conservative lights such as George Will have to keep flogging the welfare horse, writing:

If there is a resurgence of the level of transfer payments to welfare recipients now, that is not due to any relaxation of the standards under which people qualify for welfare. (Indeed, the bar to obtain and keep benefits remains quite high.)

Nor is it the result of some sweeping cultural degradation foisted upon the good and hard-working American people by “progressives,” as Will ultimately insists. There is little to suggest struggling Americans have become newly enthusiastic about being compelled to seek help – including from the government – to make ends meet.

That the United States is at the bottom of rankings of social mobility among OECD countries matters little to theoreticians like Will, Richter writes.

Facts be damned. Hands up as well as handouts are for the weak, and against the natural order. The Founders may have mentioned tending to the “general welfare” twice in the U.S. Constitution, but they didn’t really mean it. Social Darwinism and The Market are hungry gods.

UPDATE: Fixed payment typo.