Month: March 2015

Fear itself
by Tom Sullivan

Restraining myself from posting one of Stephen Colbert’s “ThreatDown” bits (maybe the All-Bear Edition). The numbers are in:

Washington (CNN)Americans have grown increasingly wary of ISIS over the past six months, but their confidence in the U.S.’ ability to combat the extremist group is waning, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.

The poll finds fully 80% of Americans say ISIS poses a serious threat to the United States — a steady increase from September, when 63% said the same.

Only 6 percent think ISIS is not a serious threat. The latest suicide attacks in Yemen and the museum attack in Tunisia will probably shave that number down some more. But how real are those perceptions? (Stupid question.) Paul Waldman examines that at Plum Line:

It isn’t hard to figure out why so many people think the Islamic State threatens the United States. When you see horrifying descriptions and pictures of beheadings, your emotional response can overwhelm any kind of rational reaction. To many people, there’s a large undifferentiated mass of scary foreigners out there, and any news related to terrorism or war anywhere means that we’re more endangered than we were. And then, of course, we have politicians who go around telling any camera they can that we’re all about to die; give props to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for telling a three-year-old girl, “Your world is on fire.”

But guess what: Our world isn’t on fire. Yet it’s almost impossible to say in our contemporary debates that a hostile country or terrorist group isn’t a threat, especially if you’re a politician. Claim that the Islamic State — horrible though it may be — isn’t much of a threat to us, and you’ll be branded naïve at best, a terrorist sympathizer at worst.

Now, let’s entertain a truly radical notion: Even if the Islamic State could launch a successful terrorist attack in the United States, that still wouldn’t make them much of a threat. How many Americans could they kill? A dozen? A hundred? That would be horrible. But car accidents kill almost a hundred Americans each and every day.

I have a 1982 Scientific American article here (Xeroxed. Remember kids?) in which study subjects were asked to rank a sampling of 30 sources of risk. Nuclear power topped the list for the League of Women Voters and college students, although it ranked 20 in terms of attributable deaths. Business professionals ranked nuclear power No. 8. Pesticides also made the top ten for the League and college students. It showed up at 28 on the researchers’ list. At the bottom of list of risks for all three groups? Vaccinations. Where would they rank today? We’re not very good at this.

Waldman writes, “The same people who want everyone to constantly proclaim the United States’ awesomeness often act as though we’re a nation on the verge of destruction, so weak and vulnerable are we in the face of knife-wielding masked men thousands of miles away.”

Closer to home — you may not have known this — homosexual marriage is a “tip of the spear” threat requiring drastic measures. Via a recording from Israel presented to an American Pastors Network conference this week, Mike Huckabee asked pastors to “call down God’s fire” on America, reports Right Wing Watch. But wait. There’s more:

Among the participants was Sandy Rios, the American Family Association’s director of governmental affairs and daily radio host, who repeated her warning to those in attendance that they had better “prepare for martyrdom” if marriage equality becomes legal throughout the country.

They may fear one another, but at least martyrs understand one another.

Update: Just recalled that someone on the radio recently quipped that the chances of being killed by a terrorist are less than the chances of being struck by lightning while being eaten by a shark.

Goodbye cruel world

by digby

Beck’s done:

I’ve made my decision – I’m out. I’m out of the Republican Party,” the founder of The Blaze announced on his radio show. “I am not a Republican; I will not give a dime to the Republican Party. I’m out. I highly recommend – run from the Republican Party. They are not good.”

“They ran and they said they were doing all of these great things and they were going to stand against Obamacare and illegal immigration – they set us up. They set us up. Enough is enough. They’re torpedoing the constitution and they’re doing it knowingly. They’re taking on people like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and they are torpedoing them. Knowingly,” Beck said.

“So I’m done with them,” the onetime Fox News host concluded. “Four years ago I was with them. Four years ago I said work from the inside: let’s change it. Let’s get new guys in there. It’s too late.”

… it can only be failed.

Tweets ‘O the Day, acts of terror edition

by digby

2 days, 2 continents, 2 horrific acts of terror. And #ISIS is warning these are just the start. #TheLead is live http://t.co/exxRpgvOS8
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) March 20, 2015

And on another continent:

Watch live: Police update on #Mississippi hanging #TheLead http://t.co/5M873Ln6Kx http://t.co/KeaJb6ubtt
— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) March 20, 2015

You won’t believe what they’re considering as the GOP alternative

by digby

So Paul Ryan is out there instructing states not to set up state exchanges if the Supremes knock down the federal exchange subsidies. He said he’s been assured that Justice Alito will convince the majority that they need to delay kicking people off of insurance until the Republican congress can offer a conservative alternative that will be acceptable to the Republican Governors in every state.

Guess what they’re talking about as the alternative?

His remarks Thursday offered the most detailed vision yet of the House Republicans’ thinking. Mr. Ryan suggested the GOP caucus was most enthusiastic about allowing states to strip some of the health law’s requirements that insurance plans must provide certain minimum benefits and a requirement that insurers sell to all customers equally regardless of their medical history.

“We think things like community rating and other regulations make insurance needlessly expensive for most people and that there are better more targeted ideas out there to help those with pre-existing conditions get affordable care,” he said. “We just want to give people market freedom and personal freedom so that they can buy what they want.”

The single most important aspect of Obamacare, the one thing that one would assume nobody would try to mess with — the ban on denying insurance because of a pre-existing condition — is the main provision they want to get rid of. In other words, they want to make sure that people who are sick are either tied to their insurance companies (with back-breaking premiums that go with that) for life. Or maybe death since a lot of people just won’t be able to afford insurance at all so they’ll just die.

I wonder if they know that this is the most popular part of the law or if they just think “to hell with a bunch of sick people, they don’t vote for us anyway.” Not that it matters. The fact that they are even considering this cruel blow to their fellow citizens in the name of “freedom”is simply mind-boggling.

I guess you might say that death is the ultimate freedom but it’s fair to say that most people don’t think that’s what the founders were talking about.  It does sound as though that’s what the modern GOP is talking about, which is actually very clarifying.

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If the Democrats propose a budget and nobody knows about it, did it actually happen?

by digby

I wrote about the beltway’s endless fascination with Republican budgets this morning at Salon:

It must be springtime since all of the Village is once again excitedly poring over the Republican budget plan. As usual they are searching for reasons to praise its responsible agenda of slashing benefits for poor , old and sick people in order that we all be forced to “take our medicine” and recognize that “we are all going to have to sacrifice.” (Of course the millionaire celebrities who are saying won’t feel any pain, but you can be sure they have your best interests at heart.)

In years past, the star of the show was Very Serious Person, Paul Ryan, the Republican budget savant who everyone agreed was so spectacularly serious that even though his budget numbers never added up, he was still worthy of deep respect and rapt attention just because he was so darned … serious. This piece by William Saletan from 2012 perfectly illustrates the phenomenon:

Ryan is a real fiscal conservative. He isn’t just another Tea-Party ideologue spouting dogma about less government and the magic of free enterprise. He has actually crunched the numbers and laid out long-term budget proposals.

Paul Krugman was appropriately gobsmacked:

Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal. So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.

What Ryan is good at is exploiting the willful gullibility of the Beltway media, using a soft-focus style to play into their desire to have a conservative wonk they can say nice things about. And apparently the trick still works.

Indeed it did. But it turns out that it wasn’t only particular to the Very Serious Ryan, with whom they did have a Very Serious love affair. For years, no matter how tragically misguided the proposed tax cuts for the rich and benefits cuts for the poor and whatever hare-brained “reforms” he pretended to propose the commentariat acted as if the yearly Republican budget had been delivered directly from Mt Sinai. This year proves that they will greet every braindead, extremist GOP budget with similar excitement regardless of Ryan’s involvement. The 2015 Budget Committee proposal under the new chairman Tom Price, for instance, has garnered tremendous coverage even as it’s acknowledged by everyone that it has as much chance of passing as a ban on flying American flags at political events.

Also: Krugman takes the GOP budget downtown today.

He’s not delusional even though he sounds as if he is 

by digby

I know that Bill O’Reilly sounds idiotic here:

Fox News’ Bernie Goldberg told Bill O’Reilly tonight he needs to understand that the liberal media may be biased, but so is Fox News, with many of its regular faces turning a blind eye to conservative problems.

“Liberal news organizations are going to play down liberal screw-ups,” he said, “but Fox News is gonna play down conservative screw-ups.”

O’Reilly objected to that, citing his show in particular. He touted all the fair, independent-minded people he brings onto The Factor, who are more than willing to criticize Republicans when they deserve it. Goldberg responded, “This program is not all of Fox News.”

They tussled a bit over other shows O’Reilly argued are fair, and Goldberg didn’t dispute that Bret Baier, Chris Wallace, and Megyn Kelly are great, but they’re not all of Fox. O’Reilly said, “That’s most of Fox.” Goldberg shot back, “No, not even close.”

I personally know some older white men who so not see themselves as the right wing hacks they are and insist they are “independent thinkers” who “see the world more clearly” that others. They watch O’Reilly religiously. They believe he too is somehow “independent” and doesn’t follow the party line. This is mostly because he says so every five minutes even as he’s spewing the most insane wingnut propaganda imaginable.

This is O’Reilly’s brand: an obnoxious conservative older white male who knows he’s superior to everyone else and isn’t afraid to admit it. That’s a big demographic and explains why he’s so darned successful.

*And Chris Wallace and Megyn Kelly are both hard core conservatives. Kelly has challenged the CW a couple of times. Wallace considers himself a serious newsman so he doesn’t engage in War on Christmas bullshit.  But they are both very right wing. Baier is just a corporate robot without any discernable personality at all.

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This is what happens when the richest people have all the money

by digby

This is pocket change for billionaires. They have so much they can afford to spend such vast sums without even feeling it:

And 2016 is going to break all records.

With few exceptions (such as Sheldon Adelson who is spending much of his fortune on politics for the purpose of influencing Israeli politics) most of these wealthy people are doing this simply make sure they are able to keep every last dirty dime they ever touch. They want it all, including yours.

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“Race Together” to TPP at Starbucks

by Gaius Publius

Much is being made of the attempt by Starbucks billionaire owner Howard Schultz to wash himself and his company in Millennial-friendly, racial justice cred by asking his “partners” (employees, retail counter workers) to write “Race Together” on coffee cups. Wonderful social-justice move, or cynical self-branding ploy? Race Together to justice, or simply to profit?

My guess in both cases is the latter, but feel free to decide for yourself. Starbucks is, after all, a corporation. While Starbucks may be just the local morning brew shop to most people, it’s also the largest company of its type in the world, a real money machine:

Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world ahead of UK rival Costa Coffee, with 21,536 stores in 64 countries and territories, including 12,218 in the United States, 1,716 in China, 1,330 in Canada, 1,079 in Japan and 808 in the United Kingdom.

Revenue topped $14 billion in 2013, and for the quarter ending December 28, 2014, the company showed a 13% increase over the year before. And of that money, Schultz and his fellows drink deep. Which means that Starbucks, like every other CEO-dominated corporation, has an insatiable need for profit, and therefore a seat at the secret, profit-protecting TPP negotiating table.

From the good people at Sardonicky:

Race for the Bucks

For sheer tone-deaf chutzpah, Starbucks and its billionaire CEO Howard Schultz deserve every single one of the vitriolic Tweets being hurled their way over their latest phony marketing campaign. The ploy is to get the rich white people who buy their overpriced coffee — and the poor white people who serve them their overpriced coffee — to forget all about wealth inequality and the class war, and have an awkward concern-trolling conversation about black people instead.

As if you needed another reason to boycott Starbucks.

But, if you still insist on patronizing this franchise for your $5 fix of caffeine, I suggest you also instigate a conversation about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Starbucks is, after all, one of the 600 or so lucky multinational corporations negotiating in secret to take over the world. …

There’s more, including some suggested ways for you to “initiate a conversation” with your Starbucks “partner” (do it gently though; these are the Starbucks equivalent of McDonalds employees, victims like the rest of us).

In Starbucks case, the TPP provisions of interest revolve around agriculture, including possible restrictions to something called “fair trade” (which Starbucks dislikes) and global deregulation of GMOs (which Starbucks incorporates into many of its foods).

About Starbucks and “fair trade”:

Starbucks fails the Fair Trade test

Starbucks wants you to feel all warm and fuzzy about buying its coffee. But here are the facts. According to the company’s own global impact report, only 8.4 percent of the company’s coffee purchases in 2013 were certified fair trade.

So how does the company get around such a dismal fair trade track record, and still fool consumers into thinking it “cares” about coffee farmers? By creating its very own “fair” trade standards.

Again, according to the coffee giant’s global impact report, 95.3 percent of Starbucks coffee is “ethically sourced.” But all that means is that those coffee purchases meet the (weak) standards of Starbucks’ in-house program, called CAFE (Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices). These sub-standard standards are often applied to large-scale plantations, which then compete against small-scale coffee co-ops for which (real) fair trade standards were intended to provide market opportunities.

Starbucks’ CAFÉ standards are focused on the farm level, not on Starbucks’ own commitment to farmers in terms or long-term stability. Unlike genuine fair trade standards, the CAFÉ program standards don’t specify either a minimum price or a standard for negotiating price that would guarantee a fair price for small farmers.

You can learn more about how Starbucks skirts the Fair Trade issue at the Fair World Project.

About Starbucks and TPP (same link):

A representative from Starbucks has a seat at the table of the highly secretive negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a global trade deal being negotiated behind closed doors. The public and most of Congress have been shut out of the negotiations—but nearly 600 corporations, including Starbucks, have full access.

When a representative from the OCA’s Fair World Project contacted Starbucks to ask what role the company is playing on the negotiating team, and what policies the company is advocating, she was referred to the company website for its “policies on free trade.”

Just what you’d expect from a billionaire likely-libertarian like the union-hating Schultz:

You don’t have to look far to find high-profile CEO types who are likely
Libertarians hiding out in the major parties. Starbucks’s Howard
Schultz has broken with Democratic tradition (and his political donation
record) and fought unionization.

Profit first — that’s one way Starbucks’ CEO “races forward,” and he’d be the first to be proud of it (though likely only to his peers). Here is another race-forward action by the Millennial-friendly Schultz, his menu:

And at least on the West Coast, every single pastry item arrives at the store individually wrapped and sealed in plastic. Individually. Every single item. That’s a ton of single-use plastic that dies before 10 in the morning. Do they recycle? Not at my store.

If you don’t believe me, ask to look at it. It’s quite a sight. (And remember, the employee didn’t make that decision; Schultz and the other high-wage executives did.)

My suggestion: If your barista hands you a cup with “Race Forward” written on it — add “By Fighting Fast Track & TPP” and hand it back. Then ask for an unadorned cup and tell her she can keep that one for herself, as food for thought. You too can be Millennial-friendly and build a better world at Starbucks.

GP

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Changing the culture. Emphasis on cult.
by Tom Sullivan

This is an old story of mine about how views on education have changed:

I grew up thinking that education was its own reward. In college, I studied, philosophy, art, drama and science. Yeah, I waited tables and traveled for awhile. After college, I was appalled at the attitude of many customers. They’d ask if I was in college. No, I told them, I’d graduated. Next question: What was your major?

When I told them, their eyes went blank. “But what are you going to do with it,” they’d ask. You could see the gears going round in their heads. How did that (a philosophy degree) translate into *that* as they mentally rubbed their finger$$ together.

Education used to be valued for its own sake. Not anymore.

America’s founding ideas were cultivated and distilled by people of the Enlightenment, probably the best educated the world has ever produced. Men mostly. White men. Wealthy white men.

Two and a quarter centuries later, another collection of wealthy white men want America to return to those roots, where only wealthy, white people will be educated in wealthy, white, business-friendly ways. State supports for low tuition rates “distort” the market. Costs must rise to drive students who can still afford it into the more remunerative majors. Tech schools for the rest.

Our modern Übermenschen want to terraform our minds. To make humans suitable for their brand of capitalism, they must remake the culture. Emphasis on cult. The Great Whitebread Hope is trying to “reform” the University of Wisconsin into a vocational school. Meanwhile, the purge continues at the University of North Carolina. I’ve written about it over and over. Now it’s the Jedidiah Purdy’s turn at the New Yorker:

For several years, there have been indications that the state’s new leaders want to change the mission of public higher education in North Carolina. In 2013, the Republican governor, Pat McCrory, told William Bennett, a conservative talk-show host and former Secretary of Education, that the state shouldn’t “subsidize” courses in gender studies or Swahili (that is, offer them at public universities). The following year, he laid out his agenda in a speech at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Using the language of business schools, he urged his audience to “reform and adapt the U.N.C. brand to the ever-changing competitive environment of the twenty-first century” and to “[hone] in on skills and subjects employers need.” McCrory also had a warning for faculty members whose subjects could be understood as political: “Our universities should not be used to indoctrinate our students to become liberals or conservatives, but should teach a diversity of opinions which will allow our future leaders to decide for themselves.”

All those stupid, unmarketable things our Enlightenment Founders had learned in school? You know, history, Greek and Latin? E pluribus unum? French. French literature and philosophy? What did they ever do with that? What use are they to homo corporatus? He needs a trade. Well okay, maybe a little philosophy of the proper sort. Purdy continues:

The other reformist front is a call to revive the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. A Pope Center research paper published this year describes a “renewal in the university” through privately funded programs dedicated to teaching the great books untainted by relativism. The report devotes a great deal of attention to programs dedicated to “the morality of capitalism,” which have been founded at sixty-two public and private colleges and universities. Many of these programs, which are often housed within business schools or economics or political science departments, were funded over the past fifteen years by North Carolina-based BB&T Bank, under its former president John Allison, who is now the C.E.O. of the Cato Institute. In a 2012 statement, Allison explained that he funded the programs to “retake the universities” from “statist/collectivist ideas.” He also noted that training students in the morality of capitalism is “clearly in our shareholders’ long-term best interest.”

Because when betterment meets bottom line, betterment loses (or is redefined). “A successful humanities education makes the obvious questionable,” Purdy writes. But questioning is not the object for results-oriented businessmen. They want results and a return on investment. Just a wild guess, but the only market testing these Market mavens did (if any) for their proposed curriculum was among other wealthy, white men.

As it happens, I wrote about BB&T’s putsch to indoctrinate university students in Ayn Rand’s sociopath morality as the Great Recession took hold in January 2009. Reprised here:

A struggling George Bailey once received a fat cigar and a generous job offer from banker Henry Potter. Potter pointed out that it would be in George’s self-interest to accept it and forget about that old savings and loan and all the little people it served. George Bailey turned down that deal.

Western Carolina University and other financially struggling universities have received similar offers from the BB&T Foundation. The catch is that they have to indoctrinate students in Ayn Rand’s economic philosophy and teach Atlas Shrugged.

Mountain Xpress’ report on the BB&T grant to WCU [“Capitalism on Campus,” Dec. 23] quotes College of Business Dean Ronald Johnson saying, “As a businessperson, you have to have a set of principles—or a philosophy. … Those people who do not have a firm foundation … are not likely to be very successful.” Also, “The base of my philosophy is wealth maximization.”

Wealth maximization, I take it, has always been the primary philosophical foundation of business ethics—pretty thin gruel—and the foundation for both Duke University’s recent Fuqua School of Business cheating scandal (among others elsewhere) and the scruple-free atmosphere behind the subprime gold rush.

Pursuit of—if not full realization of—the “pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism” that Rand advocated has brought the world economic system to its knees. Rational self-interest wasn’t supposed to be so irrational. Nonetheless, free marketers have redoubled efforts to resuscitate their philosophy, including offering colleges lucrative grants to teach it.

Economic meltdown is not a failure of their philosophy—no. Washington just didn’t do laissez-faire right. When tax cuts failed to produce promised jobs, it just meant we needed more tax cuts. Or as the blogger Digby observed, “Conservatism never fails. It is only failed.”

The Detroit bailout debate revealed that, for many opponents, the loss of millions of jobs was acceptable collateral damage in propping up their economic philosophy: Government intervention would be a deplorable violation of free-market principles.

It is symptomatic of the Gilded Age that economic principles trump all others. Most people learn better in Sunday school.

In the wake of business-school scandals, the Enron/WorldCom/Tyco scandals and Wall Street’s sub-prime/derivatives scandal: If parents and churches don’t, somebody should teach remedial ethics. But is it acceptable for our shrugging Atlases to bribe colleges to teach theirs?

Having taken control of state governments, conservatives/libertarians no longer have to ply potential converts with beer or pay bribes to have their faith taught in state schools. They can simply “reform” the schools. I call them the Midas Cult. Their behavior and tactics continue to reinforce that impression.

He wouldn’t do that

by digby

James O’Keefe says that if you know his body of work you know that he would never try to incite violence against he police:

A controversial conservative activist is being accused of trying to incite anti-police protesters by saying, “I wish I could kill some of these cops,” to provoke them into making outrageous statements.

A former top staffer with Project Veritas, Richard Valdes, said the incident occurred in January, when an undercover operative assigned to infiltrate the protest groups was given a script that included the startling comment.

Valdes said he was fired by the group’s founder, James O’Keefe, for not following through on the bizarre assignment.

Valdes said Veritas assigned a Muslim undercover agent pretending to be anti-cop to attend protest meetings and utter the following statement: “Sometimes, I wish I could just kill some of these cops. Don’t you just wish we could have one of the cops right here in the middle of our group?”

Actually, if you are familiar with his body of work you know it’s exactly the kind of thing he would do. I wonder if this will finally get him into real trouble? Eh, probably not.

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