Over at the Huffington Post, Arthur Delaney tries to get to the bottom of, Just How Much Does Paul Ryan Want the Government to Plan Poor People’s Lives? And, as is getting more and more common with the more and more vanilla website, he doesn’t really answer the question. But he does provide a good overview of just what the Republican wunderkind is up to. And as expected, he is showing himself to be the fraud he has always been.

Apparently, Ryan told the Christian Science Monitor today that the whole case management thing was just an idea he was fond of. Just like when people noted the gaping holes in his budget, he argues that despite all the big deal made of his plan, it’s not set in stone. Apparently, anything that anyone has a problem with will be jettisoned and so his poverty proposal is just as serious as his budget was. But it’s worse than even that.

Ryan told the Huffington Post, “What we’re saying is we’re not mandating case management. We’re saying this is one of the things we recommend, but give the states the ability to try other ideas.” Now you may not be as fluent as I am in the obscure Charlatan language, so let me translate. He’s saying that the most important thing is to bind up all the the poverty plans and block grant them. That’s what he really cares about. And the reason he really cares about it is that this is a way that the poverty programs can be destroyed over time.

Again, I wonder: why is anyone taking this guy seriously. He cares about the poor the way I care about Potato Bugs: I know they exist and they will always exist, but I don’t want them around me. Let’s be clear about this. Paul Ryan’s primary plan to help the poor is to do what he’s always wanted to do: block grant programs that conservatives don’t like. His other big idea is to create “case workers” for the poor. What he’s thinking—what he “knows”—is that the poor aren’t poor because of a lack of opportunity; they are poor because they just don’t know any better. If they had a more “can do” attitude and a cool Eddie Munster haircut like Paul Ryan, they too could be on the short list for the Republican presidential nomination.

It is worse than stupid that the media continue to treat this guy with even a modicum of respect. I assure you that a young black man who had failed as totally in his career as Paul Ryan has in his would undoubtedly be spending life without parole in a prison somewhere. But Paul Ryan is a rich white guy. So we have to listen to him because rich white guys are always serious and important and filled with wisdom.

But something more general has been on my mind. This isn’t just about the media needing to find a “serious” Republican. It is about this idea that both sides of the political isle want to help the poor; both parties care about making America better for everyone. But that is absolutely not true. If you want to see the real political divide in this country, look at the anti-immigration protests. Look at the angry people screaming with their “Return to Sender” signs. This is the Republicans Party in a general sense. They don’t care about the kids fleeing death in their home countries. And to the point: they don’t care that people are born into poverty, live in poverty, and die young in poverty. If Paul Ryan really cares about poverty, he needs to switch parties first.

Thomas Frank has been recycling some old essays recently, and yesterday, he posted one he wrote after Obama had won the election but before he took office, Obama Really Let These Clowns Win? How Right-Wing Obstruction Always Trumps Sober Centrism. In a certain way, it is just his way of saying, “Told you so!” But I’m not so interested in it for being prophetic as I am in how much it parallels my own thinking.

The base of his essay is that Clinton played the “moderate” game and moved the country to the right and Obama was looking as though he was going to do the same thing. And we all now know that he did just that. It’s true that Obama did not hurt the country nearly as much as Clinton did. But given the opportunity that Obama had coming in right after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you have to say that he did as bad a job as Clinton.

Frank ended his essay on what was undoubtedly meant to sound hopeful but in retrospect just makes me want to close up the house and go back to bed for a decade or two:

But there is more Frank’s article than a look back on Clinton and a look forward to Obama. He also gets into the thinking of the professional centrists, of which Obama and Clinton are members, but who are mostly journalists. As he noted, “The real-world function of Beltway centrism has never been to wage high-minded war against ‘both extremes’ but to fight specifically against the economic and foreign policies of liberalism. Centrism’s institutional triumphs have been won mainly if not entirely within the Democratic Party…” Indeed.

I’ve gone farther on this issue, as I did back in 2012 when I wrote, Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness. In it, I discussed William Saletan of Slate, but more as a type than as an individual:

And I suspect this is the problem with Clinton and Obama. They are winners in society. They may care more about the poor than the Bush family, but they are no less estranged from the poor. So of course Obama would never think about raising the payroll tax cap: that would hurt every one of his friends and himself. So the only solution that makes sense to him is to cut Social Security benefits in a politically viable way. It isn’t that he’s a bad man, it is just that like everyone, he is largely biased by his own class interests. And those are the interests of what is called a centrist.

But as I’ve shown, centrism isn’t the middle between the two extremes. In fact, if you look at the American people, elite centrism is more or less the popular anti-centrism. The people tend to be economically liberal and socially conservative. So what Democrats and most of the press call the “middle” is anything but. The main thing to remember however, is that whether it is elite centrism or popular centrism, it is still an ideology. Obama’s claims about being post-partisan make him either a charlatan or a fool. Regardless, we are lost as long the “liberal” Democratic Party keeps electing people like him. As Thomas Frank noted, “Centrism is not merely a mental habit of the comfortable, but an ideology of its own, a system of cognition that stands beyond proof or refutation.” Obama and Clinton will go to their graves certain that they had found the Aristotelian perfection: the golden mean between the two extremes.

There has been a lot of liberal rethinking and despair about what’s going on with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yesterday, Jonathan Chait wrote, Israel Is Making It Hard To Be Pro-Israel. And then this morning, Ezra Klein wrote an article basically commiserating with Chait, Why I Have Become More Pessimistic About Israel. Klein does a better job of getting at the real problem, which is that Israel’s actions are bad for it in the long term.

In bars up and down the west coast in the 1980s and 1990s, and even to this day but to a much smaller extent, I came upon a certain kind of person who had fought in the Vietnam War. And they would lament the fact that we could have won that war but the government just wouldn’t let them. I think these guys felt they had to defend themselves and their generation. This came from the fact that a lot of people thought that the Vietnam War was the first war that the United States lost. Just on a factual basis this is absurd: we lost the War of 1812, and this is why we make such a big deal of the Battle of New Orleans—it was the only thing that went well for us in that war.

But the truth is that the point of war is never to “win.” By this logic, we could have “won” the Vietnam War by simply nuking the country back to the stone age. And that takes us to everyone’s favorite Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz and his often quoted aphorism, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, the war is not the point; the war is just a tool. Now I would argue that ultimately wars serve only themselves, and this is why after just about every war, people wonder why we fought it. But there is no doubt that rulers generally start wars because they want to accomplish something other than killing a lot of people.

In Klein’s article, he quoted a Stratfor Global Intelligence report that looked at Israel’s long term interests. It indicated that Israel is acting as though it will always be the great military power in the region. But given that it is currently completely dominant, the chances are that in fifty years Israel’s situation will be worse than it now is.

What we know is that when these conflicts arise, both sides gain more political power. It’s like after 9/11—it greatly increased support for President Bush. The whole thing makes me even more cynical, because if anyone should be thinking about the long term, it should be Israel. But instead, Benjamin Netanyahu and most of the Israeli government seem to care more about their short term political interests. Clearly, Netanyahu’s power is increased when Hamas starts shelling. So that’s what conservative politicians in Israel get. But Israel, if anything, gets weaker.

It all reminds me of The Battle of Algiers where effectively the French “win” the battle, but lose the war. I don’t think the Israeli government is working in the interest of Israel just as I don’t think Hamas is working in the interest of Palestine. It is almost an unspoken conspiracy for leaders of both sides to increase their internal power, while actual people die and the long term prospects of both sides look dimmer by the day.

See Also

Cause of Every Israel-Palestine War
Don’t Ask How the US Would React
A Modest Proposal for Israel-Palestine
Israel’s Long-Term Security
Two-State Solution Unlikely Anytime Soon

One month ago, after the Supreme Court decision in Burwell v Hobby Lobby, I wrote, SCOTUS Says Not All Religions Are Equal. In that article, I discussed how the real takeaway from the decision was not that religious companies can deprive women of birth control healthcare coverage; it was that not all religions are equal. In other words, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court violated the Establishment Clause. The reason is very simple: the majority argued this case very narrowly so that they wouldn’t have to similarly apply it to Christian Scientists, for example. Doing so would have basically signaled the end of law in the United States: you can do anything God tells you to. The problem is that I don’t see any reason to think that conservative Christians who are against birth control pills have a more sincere belief than Christian Scientists who believe that any disease (Except broken bones!) can be prayed away.

As I wrote then, don’t think that the Court is going to find any religious rights that the five conservative justices don’t share. But that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from getting excited. The Satanic Temple, for example, is looking to use Burwell v Hobby Lobby to make the case against “informed consent” laws. These are laws that Republicans have passed all over the country that require women be given generally dubious and often explicitly religious information before they can get an abortion. These are extremely vile laws that in addition to everything else treat adult women as though they were children.

The Satanic Temple’s reasoning is that their beliefs about medicine are dictated by the best scientific evidence and so their religious rights are being violated by being required to hear about things that go against their beliefs. It’s a good argument. And despite what people claim, The Satanic Temple is a serious religious group that sees Satan as representing those on the margins of society—who have been, to be blunt, cast out. (I get angry especially at liberals who just dismiss it as a trolling organization.) But of course, the Court won’t even hear such a case unless it has to. The liberals already know how dangerous it is that the majority did, so they won’t be interested in hearing the case. And the conservatives won’t want to go against their conservative Christian ideology. (It is, of course, possible they would have to hear it because a lower court finds for The Satanic Temple because of Burwell v Hobby Lobby. If they happened, the conservatives would find some loophole like having to hear bad information is not the same as having to pay for drugs.)

Now, I hear from Right Wing Watch, Alabama Officials: Coal Regulations Violate God’s Will. According to the article:

Sure, why not? For over 200 years, the Supreme Court has found that religious rights do not trump government law. This is why Utah had to get rid of polygamy in order to become a state. (It was a big issue before it became a state and was only a territory.) But the Supreme Court made a major mistake in Burwell v Hobby Lobby. I don’t blame most of the conservatives, but Chief Justice Roberts really should have known better. But I suspect that he just thinks this one can be finessed like Bush v Gore. And he may be right.

The main thing is that Burwell v Hobby Lobby isn’t going to lead to any expansion of religious liberty. It was just another conservative effort to harm Obamacare. In the long term—within fifty years, I think—the Supreme Court will overturn Burwell v Hobby Lobby. And historians will wonder, “What were they thinking?” Or maybe we will all just get used to the Supreme Court being an extension of the parties. The conservatives justices will always find how ever conservatives want them to, regardless of the necessary twisted logic. But I don’t really think so. I think eventually the Supreme Court will be fixed, and John Roberts will be remembered as the Chief Justice who broke the Court.

We have been living through a very interesting economic time. A good example came last year with the Fiscal Cliff deal. I was for it. In fact, I was unhappy that Obama cut a worse deal than he could have—allowing rich people to keep more money than should have been. But as I also wrote at the time: in the long term, it was good policy; but in the short term, it was bad policy. We wanted the people to have as much money as possible. In this case, it didn’t matter that much because only the rich saw their income taxes go back up to the normal level, and they already have more money than they can spend. (A much bigger issue was an end to the payroll tax holiday, which was just peachy to the Republicans because, let’s fact it, they only care about the taxes of the rich.)

We have the same thing going on with re-authorization of the Export-Import Bank. The truth is that it’s a bad thing: welfare for the rich, masquerading as some great big jobs program. So we ought to get rid of it. But not now. It is a good example of why economic growth has been so anemic. It is economic death by a thousand cuts. If the Republican Party were any kind of reasonable, things would be much better by now. You can see this by looking at federal government spending after every other recession since World War II. Just check out this graph by Ezra Klein from last year. What it shows that is that when Reagan and Bush the Younger where in the White House, federal spending really helped the economy. But under Obama, federal spending has been cut so much that it has actually hurt the economy. That’s not really on Obama but rather the Republicans. And despite this, the Republicans continue to claim that federal spending is out of hand. (And they will only stop saying that when a Republican is in the White House.)

The point is that in general, we should be doing anything we can to help the economy, even stupid things like supporting the Export-Import Bank. But this morning, Dean Baker made an excellent point, More Fun and Games With Export-Import Bank. It’s in response to an article by William Brock who argued that this is all going to cost jobs. Well, that’s not especially true. It will cost profits among those favored, politically connected companies. But okay, lost profits is money that doesn’t cycle in our economy and thus jobs will be lost. But just how big would this hit be?

Baker noted that these cheap loans would not result in a decrease of exports equal to the loans, so we are looking at something like $4 to $11 billion per year, and not the $37 billion that Brock would have us believe. Compare this to the estimated $15 billion per year in exports that we lose each year because we refuse to do business with Iran. In that context, the loss of the Export-Import Bank doesn’t look that bad. We are willing to forego two to three times as much in exports because we still haven’t gotten over the hostage crisis from 35 years ago. And that’s just one example.

In another article this morning, Baker asked, Will Protection of Microsoft in China Cost the Jobs of Manufacturing Workers? The point is one that Bakes makes a lot. Our government only has so much leverage over China. And we seem to be using it to get stronger intellectual property protections, which help already rich software and movie companies. Instead, we should be pressing China to increase the value of its currency so that our exports to them would be more competitive and their exports to us, less competitive. That’s the sort of thing that would really create jobs, but instead the government (as usual) is looking out for the interests of the super rich rent seekers.

What we have in the United States is a media system that pays a whole lot of attention to things that will hurt the super rich (eg the Export-Import Bank, copyright in China) and very little attention to much bigger things that hurt the working class (eg trade with Iran, the strong dollar policy). So while it’s true that the elimination of the Export-Import Bank would be bad in the short term, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. But given that it is a welfare program for the super rich, chances are that the Export-Import Bank will be reauthorized. This is American, damn it: the rich can never be harmed!