Month: October 2015

Reifying the economy
by Tom Sullivan

From Europe to the Pacific rim, capitalism marches on. Right over democracy. Guess what? People don’t like it. You remember people? They’re the ones, as Pope Francis suggested, the economy is supposed to serve, not rule:

Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Berlin on Saturday in protest against a planned free trade deal between Europe and the United States that they say is anti-democratic and will lower food safety, labor and environmental standards.

The organizers — an alliance of environmental groups, charities and opposition parties — said 250,000 people were taking part in the rally against free trade deals with both the United States and Canada, far more than they had anticipated.

[snip]

Opposition to the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has risen over the past year in Germany, with critics fearing the pact will hand too much power to big multinationals at the expense of consumers and workers.

“What bothers me the most is that I don’t want all our consumer laws to be softened,” Oliver Zloty told Reuters. “And I don’t want to have a dictatorship by any companies.”

Yet that is what it appears we have. We are moving towards “authoritarian capitalism” like China and Singapore, says Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

That’s for me — I’m very naïve here — the importance of all these agreements, TiSA and so on. These are agreements which will determine the basic coordinates of our economic and social life, flux of capital money, flux of information for decades to come. And it’s done in secret; nobody controls it. You know, this is where we are moving. The big decisions are done in top secret. They are not even debated.

In fact, he says, “when voters really do have a choice, it’s usually perceived as a crisis of democracy.” Voters are the problem. “[W]e are basically returning to pre-democratic times, in the sense of majority cannot be trusted.”

Because the values of the economy have overtaken human values. “We have fallen so far into this paradigm of reifying the economy that we’ve said that the basis upon which we decide something is right or wrong is whether or not it grows or shrinks GDP,” Anat Shenker-Osorio observed at Netroots Nation 2014 [timestamp 2:30]

Faith in unregulated markets is misplaced, writes Robert Shiller, co-author of “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception.” Human values matter:

In fact, the real success of economies that embody free markets has much to do with the heroic efforts of campaigners for better values, both among private organizations and advocates of government regulation. For example, before 1900 most of the patent medicines that were sold to the public were fraudulent.

Most of these frauds have since been eliminated, not by market forces, but by the activities of private citizens who took action not selfishly but for the public good. Examples include Harvey Washington Wiley (1844-1930) and Alice Lakey (1857-1935), whose campaigns led to the foundation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, and Stuart Chase (1888-1985) and Frederick J. Schlink (1891-1995), whose advocacy in the 1920s led to the establishment of Consumer Reports in 1936.

But the reality of global capitalism today is, “Everyone is violating the rules,” says Žižek:

You have certain rules, but you are never really expected to follow those rules, you know. There are rules which you are expected to violate. And, a situation that interests me even more — there are not only things which are prohibited, but you are expected silently to do it, nonetheless.

This is why the economy feels out of control — the secrecy, the cheating, the race to the bottom, the running roughshod over humans in service to mammon. As I wrote:

Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.

On the Pacific rim, citizens of Australia and New Zealand are concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They don’t want “a dictatorship by any companies” either.

More trade is not what really concerns people. Sovereignty and democracy are. And stability. “People are really hungry … for economic stability, more even than economic opportunity,” Shenker-Osorio told One News in New Zealand.

The question is whether “the economy” will allow them to have any. That is the question that hangs in the balance.

Preach it sister

by digby

Catherine Rampell in the Washington Post:

And you get a tax cut! And you get a tax cut! And you, and you, and you!

Unless you’re poor. Then pay up.

So says Bobby Jindal, Louisiana governor, Rhodes scholar and celebrated policy wonk, who through his newly released hack-job of a tax plan has achieved the impossible: He has made Donald Trump look like a grown-up.

In the months since Trump began hoisting himself upward in the polls, his fellow Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to spotlight what an unserious contender he is. It’s not just his frequent insults and puerile doxxing that demonstrate his unseriousness; it’s first and foremost his intolerably silly policy positions.

Jindal has been especially critical, calling Trump an “unserious and unstable narcissist,” who “has no understanding of policy. He’s full of bluster but has no substance.”

Yet again and again, the other 14 Republican presidential candidates have proved themselves to be no less silly on policy issues than Trump. On the occasions when he has staked out new territory on the craziness frontier, the other candidates have quickly tried to meet or surpass him. This was the case, for example, with his hateful comments about immigration (which led to me-too calls to unilaterally ignore the 14th Amendment, among other highlights). Trump says jump, and the other contenders say: How far right?

There’s more., specifically about their economic “policies.”

This problem really can’t be overstated. Trump and Carson’s campaigns may seem like jokes. But their lunatic presence is pushing the GOP even farther to the right on economics. That’s not good for anybody.  Too many people think they still make sense on that issue:

.

Another armchair Dirty Harry lectures Jews on the Holocaust

by digby

Seriously, folks, if the European Jews in Europe during the 30s had only had the huge, clanging cojones of the modern American conservative male they could have changed the course of history. Instead, they meekly surrendered in the vain hope that they might live. What a bunch of cowardly wusses they were.

Dr. Ben Carson recently asserted that if guns had not been confiscated from Jews then Hitler would have had more trouble orchestrating the Holocaust.

Jonathan Greenblatt, National Director of the Anti-Defamation Leauge, quickly objected, stating that there were few firearms available to Jews in Germany in 1938 and that surrendering them did not measurably contribute to the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.

Ben Carson is right, and Jonathan Greenblatt is wrong.

For the record, I have hosted a fundraiser for Dr. Carson, but I was also born a Jew and have studied the Holocaust. And I have spoken before the Anti-Defamation League in the past.

The wisest answer to a government that insists its citizens disarm is, “Over my dead body.”

What Greenblatt fails to account for is that the surrendering of firearms by Jews when required to by Nazi authorities was not merely the surrender of guns and ammunition. Those material items would not have been sufficient to defend against the Third Reich’s military.

The mindset that Jews surrendered with their guns is far more important than the hardware they turned over: They surrendered the demonstrated intention, at all costs, to resist being deprived of liberty. If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved.

Yes, that would have required immeasurable courage. Yes, that would have required unspeakable losses. But is that not the lesson of the Old Testament? Does not Abraham bind his son Issac to an altar, willing to sacrifice his son’s life to God’s Word—to the truth? Must not we all be ready to sacrifice ourselves to stand in the way of evil?

Granted, I was not there. Granted, hindsight is 20/20. But it turns out it was a bad idea for any Jew to have turned over a gun. It was a bad idea for any Jew to have boarded a train. It was a bad idea for any Jew to have passed through a gate into a camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to do any work at any such camp. It was a bad idea for any Jew to not attempt to crush the skull or scratch out the eyes of any Nazi who turned his back for one moment. And every bullet that would have been fired into a Nazi coming to a doorway to confiscate a gun from a Jew would have been a sacred bullet.

To me, Jonathan Greenblatt seems to have forgotten those iconic words, “Never Again.” Thank God that men like Ben Carson remind us of them.

The wisest answer to a government that insists its citizens disarm is, “Over my dead body.” It would seem to be the end of any discussion and the beginning of active, heroic resistance. Because it is very hard to imagine that disempowering citizens by having them render themselves defenseless can lead to anything good. It is very likely a sign that the culture has fallen ill and that an epidemic of enslavement of one kind or another is on the horizon.

I think these folks all need to don a uniform and go over to Syria and join the opposition to ISIS. Where are their balls? Why are they capitulating to these barbarians by failing to take their AR-15s and blow the brains out of every “bad guy” in the middle east.

Thanks for nothing, cowards.

I can’t even begin to say how far backwards these people are going, but they’ve gone into full anti-semitic mode now and they don’t even know it. But then, they’re already blaming kids for failing to commit suicide for Jesus so it’s not exactly that surprising is it?

.

When Bachman met Bernie


by digby

Speaking of crazy, here’s Michele Bachmann “debating” Bernie Sanders on economic inequality

She’s really no more idiotic that Trump or Carson. But she’s missing something important that automatically grants her authority so she’s dismissed where they are not.

.

Ben Carson’s exceptional ignorance about government and the economy

by digby

This piece in Slate by Jordan Weissman spells it out:

Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson has risen to second place in the Republican presidential primary by presenting himself to voters as the accomplished, affable, soft-spoken face of conservatism’s lunatic fringe—the sort of guy who will suggest thatevolution was influenced by “the forces of evil” (aka Satan), that there are meaningful parallels between the United States in 2015 and Nazi Germany, and that next year’s elections might just get canceled due to social unrest. With that in mind, his relative lack of expertise on subjects like the federal budget or monetary policy are neither the most shocking nor worrisome aspects of his candidacy, especially considering that the current GOP poll leader is the human embodiment of belligerent ignorance and even the established candidates have staked their runs on fantastical policy platforms.

Nonetheless, given that Carson is attempting to become president of the United States, it seems worth noting that he appears to understand little about how the government he would lead actually functions or relates to the economy. On Wednesday,Marketplace ran an extensive interview in which the candidate discussed his thoughts about economics with host Kai Ryssdal, and it makes for some harrowing reading. I’ve broken out a few of the takeaways.

Ben Carson Has No Grasp of the Federal Budget

Like many a candidate before him, Ben Carson thinks the federal government would be more effective if it ran “like a business,” which in his mind would mean applying some corporate management techniques, like Lean Six Sigma, to make it more efficient. Unlike most candidates, he seems to think this will eliminate the government’s deficit. Asked how he plans to balance the federal budget, as he has said he would like to, Carson explains:

What I would do is first of all, allow the government to shrink by attrition. Don’t replace the people who are retiring, thousands of them each year. And No. 2: Take every departmental head, or sub-department head and tell them, “I want a 3 to 4 percent reduction.” Now anybody who tells me there’s not 3 to 4 percent fat in virtually everything that we do is fibbing to themselves.

This is a preposterous answer. The Congressional Budget Office reports that last fiscal year, the federal budget deficit was $435 billion (which, by the way, was the lowest since 2007 and below the 50-year average as a percentage of GDP). If you were to cut all federal outlays, including Medicare, Medicaid, military spending, and social security, by 4 percent, you would save less than $150 billion. It is unclear, however, whether Carson actually thinks he would need to cut any entitlement program spending—when Ryssdal pressed him on this point specifically, Carson said he was in favor of an “across the board” cut, but then went back to talking about “fat” in departments, which isn’t typically how people discuss Medicare benefits, for instance. Meanwhile, the CBO believes that reducing the entire federal workforce by 10 percentthrough attrition would only save about $50 billion over a decade.

It is a popular delusion that Washington could solve its long-term fiscal issues by eliminating waste and inefficiency. The reality is that we spend a great deal of money on benefits for the elderly and the poor while maintaining a massive military; the government, as the joke goes, is basically an insurance company with an army attached. The fact that a semiserious contender for president doesn’t seem to recognize this is slightly dispiriting.

Ben Carson Does Not Understand What the Debt Ceiling Is

By now, you are likely familiar with the debt ceiling. By law, the Treasury is only allowed to borrow a limited amount to cover all of its obligations. Every so often, Congress has to vote to raise that amount, so that the government can pay its bills. Failing to do so would result in an economically catastrophic default, but in recent years Republicans on Capitol Hill have tried to hold the debt ceiling hostage by threatening not to raise it without policy concessions from President Obama, a trick that they pulled off somewhat successfully in 2011, and far less so in 2014. As of now, it appears the government will need to increase the borrowing limit again in November.

The essential fact in all of this is that raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending. It lets the government pay for old spending. Ben Carson does not seem to understand said fact. Here is his exchange with Ryssdal on the subject.

Ryssdal: All right, so let’s talk about debt then and the budget. As you know, Treasury Secretary Lew has come out in the last couple of days and said, “We’re gonna run out of money, we’re gonna run out of borrowing authority, on the fifth of November.” Should the Congress then and the president not raise the debt limit? Should we default on our debt?

Carson: Let me put it this way: if I were the president, I would not sign an increased budget. Absolutely would not do it. They would have to find a place to cut.

Ryssdal: To be clear, it’s increasing the debt limit, not the budget, but I want to make sure I understand you. You’d let the United States default rather than raise the debt limit.

Carson: No, I would provide the kind of leadership that says, “Get on the stick guys, and stop messing around, and cut where you need to cut, because we’re not raising any spending limits, period.”

Given the repeated showdowns over this issue, it is simply mystifying that Carson is still missing the distinction between increasing the budget and raising the borrowing limit. 

[…]

More example of Carson’s lack of basic understanding about the government and the economy at the link. With this conclusion:

Again, none of this is quite so colorful as Carson’s talk of Nazis and Satan. But it’s disconcerting nonetheless. Carson is more genial, and given his storied career in neurosurgery, certainly smarter than Trump. But he demonstrates only the slightest bit more thoughtfulness when it comes policy, and an equally willful, talk-radio-ish disregard for math. Meanwhile, these two men combined are currently carrying about 40 percent of the Republican vote. It truly is the modern know-nothing party.

Dispatch from torture nation

by digby

A quote from an officer charged with involuntary manslaughter:

“There was nothing taught regarding tasing or drive stunning a restrained individual, either way. The lesson plan was taught on how to restrain a person, and gain compliance. And that was through the use of a taser. There was nothing on there that said you could not tase somebody that was in restraints,” said Pvt. Meyers.

A Nigerian student with bipolar disorder was beaten and tasered to death in Georgia last January. Some officers are now on trial for involuntary manslaughter. He was beaten, kicked and tasered in the jail while having what was clearly a bipolar episode. He was also tasered while he was in a chair restraint and he died from what the coroner said was a combination of the blows and tasering.

Evidence has shown she directed deputies to use the restraint chair with Ajibade after he became combative in the Receiving and Discharge Unit, injuring Sgt. Anza Rowland in a scrap over her Taser.

Johnson also directed the deputies to put Ajibade in a detox cell where glass allowed for constant monitoring.

Instead he was taken to the holding cell in the older section of the jail, which had only a glass window.

The video played for the jury showed that Johnson and two other deputies looked in on a female detainee in Cell 2 but did not look in on Ajbade two cells away.

Evans is seen getting what Assistant District Attorney Matt Breedon called a “brown paper sack and a water bottle” about 12:57 a.m. and leaving the area near Cell 4 without checking on Ajibade.

Johnson told jurors that between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. Jan. 2, that Kenny “just stated he had Tased (Ajibade). I just shook my head in disbelief.”

Evidence has showed that Kenny asked for a Taser and spit mask after Ajibade was placed in the holding cell.

You can see video of the beating and tasering here. They haven’t puublicly releasd the footage of the tasering while restrained in the chair but jurors in the trial saw it last week.

Here’s background on the case from CNN from a few months back.

They beat and tasered this mentally ill man and then tasered him again while he was restrained in a chair and then left him to die.

They were never told there was anything wrong with tasering someone while he was in restraints. They obviously didn’t think there was anything wrong with torture either. But why would they?

.

The Götterdämmerung Caucus
by Tom Sullivan

Politico put it succinctly:

House Republicans are in a historic state of chaos, torn between two ideological poles with no clear sense of who will serve as their next leader, and no idea of their governing agenda with several legislative battles in the coming weeks.

One of those poles is the House Freedom Caucus. Think Progress looks at why it has so much clout:

The House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of about 40 Republicans loosely associated with the Tea Party, has an extraordinary amount of power in this process. Any potential speaker needs the support of 218 Republicans on the floor of the House. There are currently 247 Republicans in the House. That’s a large majority but without the Freedom Caucus, no candidate can get to 218.

But the internecine Speaker battle is a Mad Magazine-ish case of “What They Say…and What They Really Mean”. According to Jud Legum, “The Freedom Caucus says they are just fighting for arcane rule changes that will enhance ‘democracy’ in the House.” But what do they really want?

Yesterday, Politico published the House Freedom Caucus “questionnaire” which it described as pushing for “House rule changes.” The document does do that. But it also does a lot more. It seeks substantive commitments from the next speaker that would effectively send the entire country into a tailspin.

The Freedom Caucus wants to guarantee its ability to use the threat of triggering a “recession comparable to or worse than 2008 financial crisis” over raising the debt ceiling to secure “significant structural entitlement reforms” (read: cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid).

The Freedom Caucus wants the next Speaker to commit to passing “all 12 appropriations bills” (no omnibus) to maximize extremists’ ability to extract maximum concessions in extended fights over each one. And to commit to shutting down the government “unless President Obama (and Senate Democrats) agree to defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood and a host of other priorities.” Or else they’ll hold their breath until our faces turn blue.

No wonder Rep. Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the Speaker race and Rep. Paul Ryan is trying avoid having the job thrust upon him. The Washington Post calls the caucus’ approach “nihilism vs. a willingness to govern.” Legum writes:

The agenda of the House Freedom Caucus makes a difficult job effectively impossible. Agreeing to their demands means presiding over a period of unprecedented dysfunction in the United States.

That is a polite way of saying what nobody wants to say out loud: the Congress is being held hostage by a doomsday cult. If the Freedom Caucus doesn’t get its way, it will ride like jilted Brünnhilde into the flames and burn the place to ashes if it cannot return God’s Own Party to the Rhine gold standard, or something. Or something like one of those dreary murder ballads. They really do love their country. And if they can’t have her, then nobody can.

Reaganism Reversed 

by tristero

Wonderful op-ed by Naomi Oreskes, well worth a full read. But I was especially struck by this:

Government and academic scientists alerted policy makers to the potential threat of human-driven climate change in the 1960s and ’70s, but at that time climate change was still a prediction. By the late 1980s it had become an observed fact. 

But Exxon was sending a different message, even though its own evidence contradicted its public claim that the science was highly uncertain and no one really knew whether the climate was changing or, if it was changing, what was causing it… 

[Exxon’s] efforts turned the problem from a matter of fact into a matter of opinion. When the Exxon chief executive, Lee Raymond, insisted in the late 1990s that the science was still uncertain, the media covered it, business leaders accepted it and the American people were confused. 

For people close to the issue, it was never credible that Exxon — a company that employs thousands of scientists and engineers and whose core business depends on their expertise — could be that confused about the science. We now know that they not only understood the science, but contributed to it.

In other words, government isn’t the problem here. Business is. Or more specifically, the rabid, self-interested pursuit of money at the expense of all other factors – including simple sanity – is.

This is just sad

by digby

Ben Carson said that no amount of bullets in dead bodies is as bad as regulating guns. Many residents of Roseburg agree  — no amount of bullets in the dead bodies of their own friends and families is as bad a regulating guns:

“OBAMA GO HOME.” President Blasted By Pro-Gun Protesters During Roseburg Visit http://t.co/rnSXXRcxKf pic.twitter.com/g2V0472BdU

— Bearing Arms (@BearingArmsCom) October 9, 2015

Protesters gathered in #Roseburg Friday to send Obama a message: Go home. #UCCshooting http://t.co/esF5673Zhf

— Maria La Ganga (@marialaganga) October 9, 2015

Lots of protesters here at the Roseburg airport waiting to “greet” @POTUS #UCCShooting pic.twitter.com/wg3TbeLsB0

— Ian Kullgren (@IanKullgren) October 9, 2015

Yes, the rebel flag was there …

Also too:

On the same day of Obama’s visit, a gunman killed one and wounded three at a college campus in Arizona, according to officials. Two were shot in another incident in student housing at Texas Southern University, The Associated Press reported.

Whatever.

.