If there is one thing that binds all the rich together it is their obsession with inflation. The situation is very simple. If you work for a living, you need a job. Modest inflation is good for the job market. But if you own for a living, then inflation is bad. That’s because the stuff you own loses value. A reasonable society would balance those two interests. Indeed, the Federal Reserve is explicitly supposed to keep both inflation and unemployment low. This is its “dual mandate.” But in practice, as long as unemployment isn’t ridiculously high, the Fed doesn’t seem to care. Effectively, they have a single mandate and that is to keep inflation at 2%.

Given that the power elites want low inflation, there is a whole pundit industry that is constantly searching for any signs that inflation is on the rise. What’s especially awful about this is that the Fed has almost magical powers to stop inflation. So there is no real need to stop inflation before it starts. But to listen to these people, we will go from 2% inflation to Zimbabwe overnight and all the bonds of the rich people will be worthless.

This actually demonstrates what’s going on. If inflation is allowed to tick up one percentage point for a couple of months, it will cost bond holders a bit of money. But that doesn’t even begin to offset the huge damage done to workers when the Federal Reserve slams the breaks on the economy to head off the rich losing a few pennies. I think it is really important to remember this the next time you hear someone ranting about inflation being just around the corner.

Recently, Dean Baker has been highlighting a new set of arguments, most recently, The Quit Rate, the Fed, and Braindead Employers. It’s about the fact that the rate at which people quit their jobs has gone up slightly. Generally, people rarely quit jobs when the economy is bad because it’s hard to find another. So these people argue that an uptick in the quit rate means that inflation is just around the corner. But as Baker points out, even with the uptick, the quit rate is still below its level during the worst of the 2001 recession.

More important, Baker made an interesting observation. Maybe people are quitting just because employers are being particularly awful during these bad times. After all, high unemployment is great for employers: they get to choose the very best workers and they get to pay them less. Baker goes on to provide a fanciful mechanism by which this might happen: employees feeling mistreated by wage stagnation.

I’m sure you have seen one or more stories about this or that company or industry that just can’t find skilled employees. But the truth is that these complaints are all nonsense. If companies really were desperate for skilled employees, wages would be rising. And we aren’t seeing it, except in a few rarefied areas like sewing machine use. So Baker concluded:

Most likely the uptick in the quit rate means nothing at all. If you sniff around employment and financial data enough, you are bound to find some random bit of information to make your case that the Fed must raise interest rates to slow the economy. That’s what these people do. But they should never be listened to. We should start fighting inflation when the inflation rate really does start to rise. Personally, I think the Fed’s inflation target should be 4%, not 2%. So I think the Fed ought to allow inflation to get quite high before pulling back. But the inflation Chicken Littles really want deflation. They are looking out for their “clients” and not at all for the economy as a whole. And they should be treated accordingly.

Digby sent me to this very interesting study that shows exactly what I’ve known for a long time, The Irony of Satire: Political Ideology and the Motivation to See What You Want to See in The Colbert Report. For those who do not know it, The Colbert Report is more or less a parody of Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor. It is to right wing opinion shows what The Daily Show is to news shows. The whole gag is that Colbert is extremely conservative and stubbornly resistant to facts. He says that he thinks with his gut. He also coined the word “truthiness,” which means, “A quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’ or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.”

But this is not how everyone perceives the show. With a group of 332 participants, the researchers found that when conservatives watch the show, they thought that Colbert was something like a double agent:

What is especially interesting about this is that Colbert commonly says things on his show that would be considered totally unacceptable if they were taken straight. For example, he recently started the “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.” If there were any question whatsoever that Colbert really believed that, I would not watch the show. And that’s but one example. So the fact that people watch him thinking it’s satire of satire is extremely troubling.

But the fact is that I’ve known this about his show. I’ve commented about it to friends. It bothers me that a sizable section of his studio audience seems not to get the joke. The joke they get is the outrageous guy just telling it like it is. It disturbs me because most politically active people can put a nice face on conservatism. Take Paul Ryan: he always claims that his policies that seem to be bad for the poor are actually good for them. And maybe he really thinks that. But the conservative voter is the guy who watches The Colbert Report and thinks that “Ching-Chong Ding-Dong” is a valid attack on Chinese Americans.

Last year on this day, I think I was a little harsh to Fra Bartolomeo who was born on this day in 1472. While I did say that “he is insanely great,” I also said that I wasn’t much of a fan. Even then, though, I admitted that the problem wasn’t with him. It was the times. It was the early days of perspective painting and religious painting especially had lost a lot of its pizzazz. But the truth is that Bartolomeo did amazing work within the constraints of the time. And really: I like him more than Leonardo da Vinci.

Two things really stand out in his work. The first is his absolutely impeccable design. That is something that is sorely missing in other painters of the period. You can see it in Madonna in Glory with Saints above. But it is found throughout his work. In fact, I haven’t seen a single painting of his that wasn’t exquisitely composed. And here is another excellent example, Scene with Christ in the Temple:

What else is clear in this painting is the second thing that I love about his work: the use of light. Here is another example, St Mark Evangelist:

Courtesy Art Prints On Demand

Happy birthday Fra Bartolomeo!

Francis Wilkinson gives a great rundown, Christie’s Bridge Report Is an Embarrassment. The report is even more sordid than the actions imply. It focuses on an alleged affair that Bridget Kelly had with Chris Christie’s campaign manager Bill Stepien. Apparently, they broke up and Kelly went on tilt, closing lanes on the George Washington Bridge for reasons that the report does not explain. Why exactly David Wildstein would go along with this is unclear. But then the whole report seems to be unclear.

The strategy of the investigation seems to have been to simply take Chris Christie’s word for everything. Wilkinson says the best line in the report is, “Governor Christie’s account of these events rings true.” And that does seem to be how the writers of the report see their job: to push the governor’s narrative. Check out this passage which is pure Christie apologetics:

In other words: (1) Wildstein never told that to the governor; and (2) even if he did Christie couldn’t have known what it was all about. But the report doesn’t just exonerate the governor. It also exonerates those around him that have not already been caught:

That’s the report in a nutshell. It can be simply summed up: everything we already know is the whole truth; there is nothing more to it. They found no evidence that would implicate Stepien and Baroni. But then, they found no evidence about anything other than the fact that Kelly and Stepien had had an affair. Really the report is little more than a hit job on Bridget Kelly.

What’s terrible is that this is not a report paid for by Chris Christie to help him in his defense. This is a report paid for the taxpayers of New Jersey. Its intent is clearly not to shed light on the bridge scandal. It is simply to give Christie cover. It is to provide a plausible narrative for him going forward. But that’s Christie, ain’t it? That’s long been the hit on him: he abuses the office for his own personal gain. That’s what the bridge scandal is about. That’s what the “Stronger Than the Storm” ad was about. And that’s the case here where Christie uses the people’s money to further his presidential aspirations.

And it may all be for naught—too little, too soon. The New York Times just reported that, Port Authority Chairman Resigns, Christie Announces. That’s David Samson, Christie’s chief ally, and the guy Christie has repeatedly claimed was absolutely positively not involved in the scandal. I do hope Christie goes down in a big way, just like Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil.

Jonathan Chait is back, Barack Obama vs the Culture of Poverty. It is the fourth article in the debate that he is having with Ta-Nehisi Coates, which I discussed last weekend, White Power and Black Oppression. It discusses the reasons that blacks are doing relatively poorly in our economy. Chait claims that it the history of oppression causing cultural dysfunction in the black community. Coates argues that we shouldn’t be discussing culture and that the issue is nothing but the abuse of white power. Coates is getting the better of the argument.

In Chait’s most recent article, he cedes a lot of ground without admitting it. As usual when one is trying to lose an argument gracefully, he’s splitting hairs. And that’s fine. The truth is that his position is really not that far from Coates’. But he keeps coming back to this idea that Obama ought to be a cheerleader for “Team Negro.” He writes, “I believe Obama can speak to the African-American community as an African-American without any wider cultural damage…” I have a real problem with this.

Let’s go back to Obama’s infamous “Popeyes Chicken” speech. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was speaking to a mostly black audience in Texas. He used the opportunity to chastise the audience about their child rearing. In particular, he said that they shouldn’t feed their kids junk food. “You can’t do that,” Obama said. “Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school.” But here’s the thing: the audience cheered. I think that indicates that the African Americans in that audience did not raise their children on Popeyes Chicken. Racism works on the oppressed as much as it works on the oppressor. They were all imagining a stereotype that, like most stereotypes, had only the thinnest relationship to reality.

When Obama gave that speech, he was feeding the bigots. He wasn’t helping the black community. He was harming it by reinforcing negative stereotypes. When I lived in Richmond, there was a Popeyes right on the edge of town. And it was not terribly busy. I assume that’s because, just like for nice middle class whites, getting fast food is a treat—something that is done now and then. Now that I live in a nice white suburb, I can tell you: there are way more fast food joints than there were in Richmond.

There are cultural problems in the black community. There are cultural problems in the white community. But somehow, we only ever think that cultural problems are what hold back the black community. This is especially ironic since black communities don’t have 200+ years of accumulated capital. We have a screwed up political environment where Republicans are allowed to be racist just as long as they don’t use the n-word. But Democrats are forced to show that they aren’t beholden to the black community by lecturing it on good nutrition. That skewed framing is symbolic of what is holding back the black community.

I just watched Good Night, and Good Luck, and I’ll probably write about it later. But it is especially appropriate because that movie is about the Joseph McCarthy communist witch hunts. They shine such a light on who we are both as a society and as a individuals. And one of the people who got that light shined on him was Budd Schulberg who was born on this day in 1914. He was one of the greatest screenwriters in Hollywood history. But when he was ratted out to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he dutifully came before the committee and sang like a bird. (Note: the HUAC was not McCarthy’s, but it is a major player in the witch hunts.)

One thing that is most sad about the artists who got caught up in all of that is that their interest in equality and nondiscrimination and justice is generally what got them in trouble. So even the “rats” were generally good people with the right instincts. And that was definitely true of Schulberg. His novels What Makes Sammy Run? and The Harder They Fall are filled with humanism. And his screenplays On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd both probe the way that powerful people control the common man. So I think they more than make up for his performance on the HUAC. After all, the problem is us, not him.

Happy birthday Budd Schulberg!

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Paul Ryan’s Racist Dog Whistle. This was about his contention that poverty was the result of lazy inner city men. Despite much contention to the contrary, it was pure racist dog whistle politics. Since then, Paul Ryan has gone around trying to prove that he isn’t racist. And it was in the service of that goal that he ended up on Bill O’Reilly’s The Factor Tuesday night.

The appearance was mostly notable because Bill O’Reilly used the opportunity to get his racist hate on. But Joan Walsh noticed some really interesting things in her article, Paul Ryan’s Endless “I Am Not a racist” Tour. Ryan used fellow Representative Barbara Lee from nearby Oakland to claim he wasn’t a racist. “She knows me well,” he said. “And she knows that I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” You know the drill. It’s the modern version of, “Some of my best friends are black!” The nice black lady says he ain’t racist so he ain’t.

But as Walsh points out, after using Barbara Lee for political cover, he stood by while Bill O’Reilly savaged her, calling her a “race hustler.” Conservatives like Paul Ryan are in a tough place. They know that it is no longer okay to be explicitly racist. But their ideological appeal still depends upon racism. I don’t know where Walsh stands on the issue, but to me it is very simple: Paul Ryan is a racist. People seem to miss the fact that outward signs of racism change over time. Just because Ryan isn’t a fire breathing bigot who uses the n-word doesn’t mean that he isn’t racist. As I wrote when I first covered the issue:

This all comes from to Lee Atwater’s infamous “nigger, nigger, nigger” quote. It doesn’t really matter what’s going on inside Paul Ryan’s pea brain. He can be nice to every black man he meets on the street. The fact is that the policies he pushes harm the poor and enrich the wealthy. And given that our society is already racist and so blacks are more likely to be poor, his policies primarily hurt them. Or as Lee Atwater would put it, all the policies Paul Ryan is “talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is: blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

It doesn’t really matter how he got to those policies. And notice: you could have said the same thing about poll taxes. You could have said the same thing about “literacy” tests. The people who push them always claim that they aren’t about race. But when we look back on them we see that of course they were about race. And that will be true in 40 years when people look back on Paul Ryan’s “culture of dependency” argument.

The standard conservative line is that governments are bureaucratic and unresponsive while privately held companies are innovative and responsive. There was never any theory to explain why that would be. And in my experience, it isn’t true. It’s just a tired talking point of right wingers who hate the government.

I grew up in small businesses. My parents pretty much never had regular jobs. And it is a freewheeling lifestyle. And a stressful one. So I have a certain fondness for people who choose that path in life. They are often quite innovative in their ways. As a result, I was really interested to read Martin Longman a couple of weeks ago, Franchisees Should Unionize to Raise Wages. It tells the story of the “typical franchisor/franchisee relationship.” And it ain’t pretty.

People who own a McDonald’s franchise, for example, have very little control over costs. They can’t find a cheaper supplier of English muffins, for example. They are required by law (Court ruling!) to buy them from McDonald’s. What’s more, they have almost no control on what they charge for food. So if employees got a raise, the money would come only out of their profits. They are forbidden to “innovate.”

What really stands out to me in this story is just how bureaucratic the franchise corporations are. The reason is that according to conservatives, there are two worlds: the world of the bureaucratic government and the world of the innovative private sector. But the truth is far more murky. The government is very often incredibly innovative. It still boggles my mind how much the DMV has changed from the early 1970s to today. But for conservatives, it is always the early 1970s. You would think they’d never had to register a new car.

On the flip side of things is that the corporate world is filled with bureaucracy. We have the example of the franchises above. But my personal favorite example is my interaction with the phone company. At the end of the calls, the tech people are forced to recite the tired, “We’re glad you have chosen AT&T…” Regardless of how personable or rude the agent was, they always turn into a corporate automaton at the end of the call. That’s corporate think for you.

Now I know that there are reasons for all this. In the McDonald’s case, the company wants customers to have the same experience at a restaurant in San Francisco as they do in Lovett. And AT&T is trying to push an image of themselves in their support calls. In both cases, it’s about branding. But it’s a rigid form of branding. Certainly third party vendors could provide exactly the right kind of muffins for the franchisees. Support personnel could push the company line in a way that was specific to them rather than reading a prepared statement.

Institutions of all kinds have to balance the power of individual initiative with the desire to provide a unified customer experience. There is nothing that stops the government from doing this well. And there is nothing that dictates the private companies will do it well. Actual experience shows this. But conservatives continue to push this tired line that the private sector is always innovating. If there’s one thing the last four decades have shown, it is that as companies get bigger and customers have fewer choices, they become far more bureaucratic and less accountable than government agencies.