Author: Tom Sullivan

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.

Rigging the rigging
by Tom Sullivan

It is one of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s signature lines: “The game is rigged.” Lina Khan at Washington Monthly fleshes out just how much. Forget the social safety net. Khan looks at how binding arbitration clauses in consumer contracts snip away what’s left of the legal safety net protecting consumers. Warren may have birthed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to give Average Joe a fighting chance, but binding arbitration still leaves the Man with all the power:

Last week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report documenting the prevalence and effects of arbitration clauses in consumer financial products. CFPB’s report captures the effects of arbitration clauses in financial products and services, based on data from the American Arbitration Association, which handles the vast majority of consumer financial arbitration cases. A few main takeaways from the study [edited for length – TS]:

•Arbitration tends to work out better for companies than it does for individual consumers: in cases initiated by consumers, arbitrators awarded them some relief in around 20 percent of cases. By contrast, arbitrators provided companies some type of relief in 93 percent of cases that they filed.

•Even the degree of relief varies notably: within the slice of arbitration outcomes that CFPB could assess, consumers won an average of 12 cents for every dollar they claimed. By contrast, companies on average won 91 cents for every dollar they claimed. In total, consumers received less than $400,000 from arbitrators in 2010 and 2011. Companies won $2 million over that same period
.
•Notably, CFPB found evidence undercutting a favorite pro-mandatory arbitration trope: that nixing arbitration clauses would burden companies with greater litigation costs, which they would be forced to pass on to consumers in the form of higher prices for their goods. CFPB found that the banks that had to drop arbitration clauses from their contracts as part of an antitrust settlement in 2009 did not subsequently raise prices for consumers.

The CFPB is expected to propose rules “limiting mandatory arbitration clauses in these take-it-or-leave-it contracts,” Khan reports. Over 90 percent of consumers in contracts with a binding arbitration clause were unaware they could not sue “or had no idea.” On average, $27,000 of consumer money is at stake in these disputes. But paired with class action bans, these contracts leave financial organizations holding all the high cards in the game and “de facto privatizes” a legal process funded with tax dollars that, at least in theory, leveled the playing field.

The sharks are running the fish hatchery. Reason #17 for changing the motto on the money from e pluribus unum to caveat emptor.

Oh, but you must be-lieve!
by Tom Sullivan

The House Republicans’ new budget plan grabs a lot of ink this morning, little of it favorable. “This takes budget quackery to a new level,” according to Maryland Democrat Chris Von Hollen. From the New York Times:

Without relying on tax increases, budget writers were forced into contortions to bring the budget into balance while placating defense hawks clamoring for increased military spending. They added nearly $40 billion in “emergency” war funding to the defense budget for next year, raising military spending without technically breaking strict caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The plan contains more than $1 trillion in savings from unspecified cuts to programs like food stamps and welfare. To make matters more complicated, the budget demands the full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the tax increases that finance the health care law. But the plan assumes the same level of federal revenue over the next 10 years that the Congressional Budget Office foresees with those tax increases in place — essentially counting $1 trillion of taxes that the same budget swears to forgo.

And so on. Et tu, Kenny? Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado told reporters, “I don’t know anyone who believes we’re going to balance the budget in 10 years … It’s all hooey.”

Dana Milbank, writing for the Washington Post, believes Republicans when they say there are no gimmicks in their budget: The budget is a gimmick.” Milbank begins by blasting the aforementioned military spending and doesn’t let up:

It assumes that current tax cuts will be allowed to expire as scheduled — which would amount to a $900 billion tax increase that nobody believes would be allowed to go into effect.

It proposes to repeal Obamacare but then counts revenues and savings from Obamacare as if the law remained in effect.

It claims to save $5.5 trillion over 10 years, but in the fine print — the budget plan’s instructions to committees — it only asks them to identify about $5 billion in savings over that time.

There’s more, but you get the point.

Jared Bernstein sums up the cynicism of the effort, which relies, once again, on Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s “magic asterisk” to produce revenues from sources other than taxes:

The policies put forth in this document suggest that America’s main problem is that the poor have too much and the wealthy, too little. The budget plan “corrects” this perceived imbalance by deeply cutting programs that help low- and middle-income people, and cutting taxes on those with high incomes, capital gains, multinational corporations and “pass through” business income.

It’s a shame (sort of) that Paul Ryan gets all the blame for voodoo economics when Saint Ronnie’s team invented it back when Ryan got quarters from the Tooth Fairy. Reagan ran for president in 1980 promising to cut taxes and expand military spending — and build a 600-ship navy — all while balancing the budget. Tax cuts that pay for themselves. “Trickle down.” I thought he was nuts. But after he won, I thought, okay, you got elected in a landslide; show me what you’ve got.

I’m still waiting. Ryan still believes in the Tooth Fairy.

From my cold, dead fingers

If there’s anyplace that defines exceptional in this big, ol’ beacon of freedom called America, it’s Texas.
They are SO American in Texas, they can even take exception to the First Amendment and puff out their chests with pride about it.

Molly Ivins, I think, used to call the Texas state legislature “the Austin Funhouse,” noting once that state legislators there are the lowest paid in the country and Texas gets what it pays for. As Digby reported yesterday at Salon, Republican state legislators are “extremely bothered by the idea that a citizen might film the police in the course of their duties.” Ergo:

The House Bill 2918 introduced by Texas Representative Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) would make private citizens photographing or recording the police within 25 feet of them a class B misdemeanor, and those who are armed would not be able to stand recording within 100 feet of an officer.

As defined in the bill, only a radio or television [station] that holds a license issued by the Federal Communications Commission, a newspaper that is qualified under section 2051.044 or a magazine that appears at a regular interval would be allowed to record police.

Isn’t that exceptional? It takes exception to the United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit in Glik v. Cuniffee (2011) and to the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit in ACLU v. Alvarez (2012), both of which uphold the right of citizens to film police.

Villalba’s bill, if it passes, will likely face challenge, however reasonable the state argues its restrictions are on private citizens filming police. But even among those Digby describes with “traditional values” who believe in “deference to authority and a bedrock belief in the integrity of those who don a uniform,” this might be a bill too far. Even Breitbart Texas is concerned. The idea that to be considered “the press” under the First Amendment you have to be licensed is absurd. Is that how gun owners think the Second Amendment works? One in-your-face tee shirt insists, the Second Amendment “is my gun permit.” And that raises a question.

Why should Second Amendment activists be the only ones to act like jerks about how their rights under the constitution “shall not be infringed”? It is, after all, the second amendment. Who gave them sole rights to what is “explicitly American“? Imagine a movement where citizen journalists demand their First Amendment right to concealed and open carry of cameras and recording devices just as belligerently as gun rights activists. Any where. Any time. Free-DOM!

We would loudly decry anything less tyranny, a slippery slope leading inevitably to “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” to jack-booted, government thugs kicking in our doors and confiscating our phones and digital cameras.

We would go to phone-and-camera shows where we could buy accessories and gear without background checks, trade vintage Nikons and Nagras, and buy flash memory in bulk. We would train on weekends and whisper threateningly of “First Amendment remedies.”

We would have Bundy Ranch-style standoffs with federal agents. We could form an American Recording Association (ARA) backed by manufacturers to lobby Congress on behalf of owners of digital cameras and cell phones, and primary any politician who stands in our way. And they would listen to us.

Do you think Fox News could get behind that? Maybe cover our rallies? What if we wore costumes?

And thumb-in-your-eye tee shirts, it goes without saying:

YOU CAN HAVE MY PHONE
WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM
MY COLD, DEAD FINGERS

‘You eat what you kill’
Tom Sullivan

You know, when I saw that headline in the Guardian, I thought I was looking at a decade-late review of the 2004 Vin Diesel film, The Chronicles of Riddick. If you missed Chronicles on cable, the film’s Big Bad (h/t to you Buffy fans) is a murderous group of interstellar religious fanatics called the Necromongers. They rampage across the galaxy, like ISIS in space ships, converting or killing everyone in their paths. They also “believe heavily in a philosophy that says ‘you keep what you kill’, believing that ending another’s life entitles you to their property and position.” Having screwed investors, thrown families from their homes, brought the planet to its economic knees, and demanded tribute (bailouts) lest they take us all down with them, that pretty much describes Wall Street’s philosophy these days, too. Which is why, as Suzanne McGee writes, “’You eat what you kill’ is the motto on many a trading desk.”

What Wall Street doesn’t believe in is its own bullshit, business school catechism about how in a meritocracy pay is a function of celestial mechanics that must not be perturbed lest we offend the Market gods – pay is an elegant function of one’s contribution to the enterprise’s bottom line. How do we know they don’t believe this?

… Wall Street’s profits aren’t what they used to be. Pretax profits fell 4.2% in 2014 to $16 billion, according to New York’s office of the state comptroller. If you think that sounds like a relatively modest decline, consider that 2014 profits were 33% below 2012 levels, and a whopping 74% below 2009, when Wall Street posted record results as markets zoomed back to life after the crisis and banks profited from ultra-low asset values and interest rates.

So what? Well, in spite of the falloff, bonuses rose for the second straight year, with “a 30.1% decline in profitability, and a 15% increase in bonus payments” in 2013, followed by a more modest 2% increase this year.

McGee explains:

Of course, here’s where the fun and games start on Wall Street. Bonuses don’t come out of a bank’s profits, but out of its revenues. It’s only folks like you and I – and, one would hope, at least some of the investors – who might want to take a look at these numbers and tie them to profits. Because what good is it rewarding employees for bringing revenue through the door if it isn’t profitable revenue?

This year, bonus payouts will amount to a whopping 170% of the profits reported by New York stock exchange member firms – profits that continue to be eroded by legal settlements and regulatory expenses. Back in 2009, that figure was slightly more than 36% of profits, and it has crept steadily higher.

Because Wall Street figures bonuses on revenue, not profits, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley dole out “about 40 to 50 cents out of every dollar of revenue they generate every year in bonuses.” That is to say, the Necromonger priests are raiding the grainaries.

But what about the excuse that Wall Street base pay is too low? McGee responds:

It only feels low if you happen to work on Wall Street. If you’re starting out, right out of college, you’ll be making about $85,000, after a wave of raises announced last year.

If they really believed in their own meritocratic gospel, the pharisees wouldn’t behave as if bonuses are bestowed by the Market simply as reward for their faith and devotion. And if shareholders weren’t such suckers for Wall Street blather, they wouldn’t stand for it.

They’ve got a little list
by Tom Sullivan

A few weeks ago, we looked at how Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is using his position to weaken and eliminate pockets of political opposition. The University of Wisconsin system, specifically. Chris Hayes had observed:

There’s something sort of ingenious about this from a political standpoint. It seems to me that one of his M.O.s in office has been to sort of use policy as a mechanism by which to reduce the political power of people that would oppose him — progressives, the left. I mean, go after the unions, right? Which is a huge pillar of progressive power in the state of Wisconsin. And another big pillar of progressive power in the state, frankly, is the university system.

I noted that Republicans in North Carolina were using the same M.O. Since then there have been more efforts by the NCGOP at legislatively targeting political opponents. Democrats swept the four open seats on the Wake County Board of Commissioners last November? No problem.

The Raleigh News and Observer’s Rob Christensen crystallizes how the GOP is working “to rig the system so the wind is always blowing at their backs.” If they control the governor’s mansion and legislature where you live, you’d best watch yours. They’ve got a little list:

This shows how politics has changed over the years.

OLD POLITICS: When your party lost an election, you got off the ground, dusted off your pants and figured out how you could do better next time.

NEW POLITICS: You begin plotting in the legislature how you change the election laws to make sure it is nearly impossible that you ever lose an election again.

OLD POLITICS: You analyze the results, figure out how to improve your get-out-the vote effort, improve your messaging, recruit better candidates and maybe raise more money. It is a strategy that requires heavy thinking, hard work and discipline.

NEW POLITICS: Draw up legislation to create new districts that makes it difficult for your party to lose. All it requires is political power, connections and a little bit of guile.

OLD POLITICS: The public is the master and elected officials are the servants, hence the term “public servants.”

NEW POLITICS: If the public – in this case the Wake County voters – do not vote in the politically correct way, then the voting system must be changed so that it does not happen again. In this case, the masters of Jones Street have deigned that the people of Wake County voted incorrectly and therefore corrective action must be taken.

Nixon had a little list. You can be sure they have too.

A duty and a privilege
by Tom Sullivan

At the Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift explains why Wisconsin Republican Jim Sensenbrenner’s bipartisan effort to repair the Voting Rights Act is going nowhere. Sensenbrenner’s H.R.885, co-sponsored by Democrat Rep. John Lewis of Georgia and forty others (including eight Republicans), was introduced on February 11. The bill is “going nowhere,” Clift believes, in spite of the observance last weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis was among the civil rights marchers famously beaten there by Alabama State troopers.

It is worth noting that H.R.885 specifically exempts laws requiring “photo identification as a condition of receiving a ballot for voting in a federal, state, or local election” from actions that trigger federal jurisdiction over state efforts to abridge the right to vote. The price of that bipartisanship, no doubt.

Clift quotes David Bositis, formerly with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies:

Asked whether the symbolism of Selma fifty years later might move Congress to act, Bositis said flatly, “It’s not going to happen, nothing’s going to happen…. On balance this is more of a problem for the Republican Party than the Democrats because the people who are being disenfranchised view the Republican Party as hostile to them. It’s hurting the Republican Party.”

The Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder in June of 2013 opened the door to a spate of voter ID laws. “Voter suppression, that’s the intent, but so few people vote in the United States,” says Bositis, “so all they’re doing is reinforcing the idea that Republicans are hostile to minority groups.” The GOP did very well in 2010 and 2014, but it had nothing to do with voter suppression, he says. Young people and minority voters typically have low turnout in non-presidential years.

[snip]

No election outcomes will be changed with or without the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act, he declares. Still, it’s important. “The fact that one of the two major political parties is hostile to the rights of minority citizens is a very big deal—and a lot of that hostility is in the center of gravity of the party, which is Southern whites.” They’re not wielding clubs and hoses anymore, he says, and they may not say anything overtly racist. They cloak their objections in states’ rights. But Republicans not only have no incentive to update the VRA, they have a disincentive, he explains.

I’ll offer two personal experiences set in sharp relief the differences between the parties regarding voting.

In 2006, I was the state party’s Get-Out-The-Vote coordinator for North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District, then 14-1/2 counties. It may sound hokey, but at the grocery store one day I had a kind of transcendental experience. I suddenly had a sense of everyone around me in the store. People standing in line at the checkouts. The woman coming towards me with the cart full of groceries. Another behind me. The people down the pet food aisle. It struck me that all these were “my voters.” Ensuring they got out to vote was both a duty and a privilege. And it didn’t matter what their party affiliation was. (Well, not at that moment anyway.) A quote from former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver) expresses it better:

“We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.”

Contrast that with the T-party’s voter integrity “boot camp” I wrote about. Not once in seven hours did anyone suggest expanding the franchise or registering new voters and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote. Forget about public good. It was a personal, white-knuckled, bars-on-the-windows exercise in keeping the unwashed Irresponsibles from stealing their votes. On Election Day, you may get up, drink your morning coffee, and then head down to your polling place to do your civic duty in the American democratic process. The T-party frets that invisible hordes of Others get up on Election Day intent on committing felonies punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine — just to add a single, extra vote to their team’s total. And they must be stopped.

Clift concludes:

In a rapidly changing America, the signals the GOP sends are as important as any legislation. Sensenbrenner told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2013 that he didn’t expect his career to include a third reauthorization of the VRA, “but I believe it is a necessary challenge. Voter discrimination still exists, and our progress toward equality should not be mistaken for a final victory.”

Good on Sensenbrenner for trying, but he’d better not hold his breath.

Behold, the relativist wasteland
by Tom Sullivan

A number of people have taken shots at David Brooks this week for his essential cluelessness about people who are not David Brooks. Over at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi calls Brooks’ “The Cost of Relativism” his “10 thousandth odious article about how rich people are better parents than the poor.” Taibbi writes:

Brooks then goes on to relate some of the horrific case studies from the book – more on those in a moment – before coming to his inevitable conclusion, which is that poor people need to get off the couch, stop giving in to every self-indulgent whim, and discipline their wild offspring before they end up leaving their own illegitimate babies on our lawns:

Next it will require holding people responsible. People born into the most chaotic situations can still be asked the same questions: Are you living for short-term pleasure or long-term good? Are you living for yourself or for your children? Do you have the freedom of self-control or are you in bondage to your desires?

Yes, improving your station is a simple matter self-discipline and of pulling yourself up by those bootstraps, if you have the boots. Can’t find a job? Pull together some investors and start your own business. Personal responsibility … yadda, yadda, yadda … achieve the American Dream.

The conservative cant about “personal responsibility” has long been a dog whistle for race. Not always, just mostly. It’s “a hell of a lot more abstract than” … well, you know what Lee Atwater said.

But it was another Rollineg Stone writer, Jeff Tietz, who provided in 2012 perhaps the most accessible portrait of the poor in “The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America’s Middle Class.” Set in Santa Barbara, CA, the piece profiles the nuevo homeless living out of cars in a church parking lot. They are “there, but for the grace of God” stories writ large. Maybe that setting is a tad less threatening than the inner-city images evoked when secure, well-off, white people write about poor people in the New York Times.

Aljazeera has a 2014 photo series on poverty entitled “Getting By” that gives a glimpse into just what living hand-to-mouth is like outside the imaginings of Fox News and David Brooks. They invite people to write in with their stories:

Sometimes I’m convinced that the stigma of poverty is worse than the actual conditions. In this country it’s assumed that if you’re poor, you’ve somehow earned it/deserve it … Living in poverty has been and continues to be, an intense as well as an invaluable education. My life is rich and happy.

I was raised in the middle class but have raised my own children in poverty, albeit American style. Sometimes I’m convinced that the stigma of poverty is worse than the actual conditions. In this country it’s assumed that if you’re poor, you’ve somehow earned it/deserve it — That you’re lazy, lacking intelligence or savvy,or simply doing something wrong. Or perhaps just “a loser,” reaping what you’ve sown. Living in poverty has been and continues to be, an intense as well as an invaluable education. My life is rich and happy, for the most part. Despite having left the consumer class two decades ago.

— Lisa Anthony, Iowa City, Iowa

Behold, the relativist wasteland.

Junior DeMint
by Tom Sullivan

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s letter to the Iranian government, the one 46 of his GOP colleagues signed, has everyone from NPR to the Wall Street Journal to MoveOn.org talking about the Logan Act. This, in spite of the fact that since its passage in 1799, there have been “no prosecutions under the Act in its more than 200 year history.” The law forbids citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy “without authority of the United States.” Whatever that means.

But the controversy must look to his T-party cohort like Tom Cotton’s coup. (Or is that Tom Cotton’s kooks?) “Cotton is a conservative hero, and a crackpot,” reads the Washington Post’s landing page teaser. Paul Waldman writes for the Post’s Plum Line:

On paper, Cotton looks like a dream politician with nowhere to go but up — Iraq veteran, Harvard Law School graduate, the youngest senator at 37. It’s only when you listen to him talk and hear what he believes that you come to realize he’s a complete crackpot. During the 2014 campaign he told voters that the Islamic State was working with Mexican drug cartels and would soon be coming to attack Arkansas. When he was still in the Army he wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that its editors should be “behind bars” because the paper published stories on the Bush administration’s program to disrupt terrorist groups’ finances (which George W. Bush himself had bragged about, but that’s another story).

While in the House in 2013, Cotton introduced an amendment to prosecute the relatives of those who violated sanctions on Iran, saying that his proposed penalties of up to 20 years in prison would “include a spouse and any relative to the third degree,” including “parents, children, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, grandparents, great grandparents, grandkids, great grandkids.” Forget about the fact that the Constitution expressly prohibits “corruption of blood” penalties — just consider that Cotton wanted to take someone who had violated sanctions and imprison their grandchildren. Needless to say, this deranged piece of legislation was too much even for Republicans to stomach, and it went nowhere.

Waldman suggests Cotton is poised to be the next Jim DeMint.

But forgetting about what the Constitution expressly prohibits is just the point for T-partiers like Cotton. Cloaking themselves in it should be enough. What the law actually says doesn’t matter. What matters is what they believe it should say. (I’ve heard this argued in person.) The fact that “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible, for example, is beside the point. It should be. It feels right. And that truthiness is good enough for them. To borrow again from Stephen Colbert, they want to feel the law at you.

Whistling past the atomic graveyard
by Tom Sullivan

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985), physicist Richard Feynman explains that one of the early problems at Oak Ridge, TN during the Manhattan Project was that nobody processing the uranium really knew much about it or what it was for. As far as the Army brass was concerned, they didn’t need to know. Except Feynman noticed plant workers storing large lots of processed uranium unsettlingly close together. Feynman observed, “Now, if you have too much stuff together, it goes up, you see.” And that would be, shall we say, bad. The staff could properly follow the handling rules only if they knew a modicum about what they were handling and how it works, Feynman knew. So J. Robert Oppenheimer had sent him to Oak Ridge to advise the plant how to handle and store the “stuff” safely. If he got any pushback, he was to say, Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the safety of the Oak Ridge plant unless ….” He did. It worked like a charm.

Safety and security at America’s nuclear facilities have always been concerns. Writing for New Yorker, Eric Schlosser provides more background on the 2012 break-in by Plowshares peace activists at the Y-12 uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. It’s a lengthy piece detailing the group’s motives, and it’s less than reassuring about the security at American nuclear facilities:

On the night of the Y-12 break-in, a camera that would have enabled security personnel to spot the intruders was out of commission. According to a document obtained by Frank Munger, a reporter at the Knoxville News-Sentinel, about a fifth of the cameras on the fences surrounding the Protected Area were not working that night. One camera did capture someone climbing through a fence. But the security officer who might have seen the image was talking to another officer, not looking at his screen. Cameras and motion detectors at the site had been broken for months. The security equipment was maintained by Babcock & Wilcox, a private contractor that managed Y-12, while the officers who relied on the equipment worked for Wackenhut. Poor communication between the two companies contributed to long delays whenever something needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t always clear who was responsible for getting it fixed. The Plowshares activists did set off an alarm. But security officers ignored it, because hundreds of false alarms occurred at Y-12 every month. Officers stationed inside the uranium-storage facility heard the hammering on the wall. But they assumed that the sounds were being made by workmen doing maintenance.

There’s much more, of course. But my mind immediately went to John McPhee’s conversations with Los Alamos weapons designer, Ted Taylor, in The Curve of Binding Energy (1973). Taylor was worried then about terrorists clandestinely getting hold of poorly secured weapons material and fashioning a crude bomb. Carson Mark admitted blithely at the time, “So far as we know, everybody in the world who has tried to make a nuclear explosion since 1945 has succeeded on the first try.” So, that’s reassuring.

One of my own experiences informs my concern over how the “stuff” is handled.

One Thanksgiving weekend in the late 1990s, my wife and I were returning from seeing friends in Mount Pleasant, SC. It was late Sunday afternoon and traffic on I-26 would be bumper-to-bumper all the way to Columbia.

In North Charleston we overtook a tractor-trailer hauling four-foot diameter stainless steel casks. Lying on their sides and the width of the flatbed, it was unusual cargo. Pulling closer, we were able to read the printing on the rear cylinder: UNITED STATES ENRICHMENT CORPORATION – URANIUM HEXAFLUORIDE.

Brilliant. Some mastermind decided to move reactor fuel – reprocessed from Soviet nuclear warheads – out of Charleston to Paducah, KY on the busiest travel weekend of the year. Sunday, yeah. Traffic is light on Sundays.

My wife was unnerved tailgating nuclear materials and insisted we drive on ahead. Ahead were three more trucks like the first. In front, an unmarked, white conversion van had curtains drawn and interior lights on in the back. “Check out the driver,” I said as we pulled alongside. Black tee shirt and military crew cut. An armed detail with automatic weapons, probably. My wife had spotted an identical van at the rear of the convoy.