Dean Baker made an important point in a recent blog post, Ben Bernanke and the “Ask Nicely” Strategy for the Trade Deficit. Everyone knows that a big problem with our economy is that US exports are not as competitive as they should be because China keeps its currency pegged lower than it should be compared to the dollar. But there is this ridiculous notion that somehow we can force China to change this policy. That was what Donald Trump talked about when he fake ran for president in 2012: he was going to talk to China like they were contestants on The Apprentice and make them change their policy. But even with sophisticated thinkers like Bernanke, the idea seems to be that if we ask nicely or whine or just let them know how much it means to us, they will allow their currency to rise.

This isn’t true, of course. China has that policy because it is good for China’s economy: it keeps the people of China working. But as Baker noted, “They would of course be open to ending currency interventions if they got something in exchange.” And that’s perhaps the biggest problem with trade deals like the TPP: they use what negotiating chips we have to do other things that are at best less important and at worse are bad for the economy. The ultimate example of this is the use of these trade deals to strengthen patent and copyright protections. These don’t add jobs in the United States; all they do is increase profits to make the already rich even richer.

And so in the TPP, there is nothing about currency values. But there is a lot in it about tightening intellectual property protections. These deals are not pushed by our government because they are seen as improving the American economy. They are instead about improving the profits of corporations that are only nominally in the United States. And just look at what great “citizens” these corporations are: they ship jobs overseas if they can save a penny; they hide profits overseas so they don’t have to pay taxes; they distort our political system; they blithely pollute; and they have a time horizon of three months. They are a pox on our country. They would be called traitors if they were human beings.

Baker related an anecdote that explains pretty much everything that is going on, regardless of whether the party in power is nominally liberal or conservative:

This is why these deals are such a problem. Even I have a tendency towards dismissing them, “Well, it isn’t going to cause that much damage.” But the issue is really not the trade deals themselves. The issue is the opportunity costs — which are huge. Our government is passing up deals that would improve the lives of American workers. And in so doing, they are making future deals that do this harder. No Trade Deals Until Our Economy Is Fixed!

On Wednesday, Digby wrote a article in which she countered this ridiculous new conservative meme that liberals are the real intolerant people because they object to conservatives bigotry (which the conservatives claim is actually “religious freedom”). I don’t have much to add. The entire time I’ve been following politics, the main conservative argument to any complaint has been, “I know you are, but what am I?” I don’t say that lightly. Conservatives have correctly learned that the mainstream media are determined to present the “controversy.” So if John Boehner walked into a McDonalds and murdered everyone, it would be reported, “Democrats claim John Boehner murdered a bunch of people, but Republicans say he didn’t. We report, you decide!”

But Dibgy presented an example of what real political and religious intolerance looks like in this country. It took place back in 2008 during a New York Yankees baseball game. A spectator at the game, Brad Campeau-Laurion, went to go to the bathroom during the seventh inning stretch. Since 2001, the MLB has dictated that “God Bless America” be played at that time. When Campeau-Laurion tried to make it to the bathroom, the police stopped him — telling him that he couldn’t go until the song was over. When he said that he didn’t care about the song, the officer, and another called for help, brutally ejected him from the ballpark.

As they shoved him out of the stadium, one of the officers said, “Get the hell out of my country if you don’t like it!” What’s more, Campeau-Laurion’s friend, who was still at the game, overheard the two officers talking to each other. One of them said, “We got to watch ourselves. One day we’re really gonna get in trouble.” And they were spreading rumors that Campeau-Laurion had said, “This country sucks.” It sounds rather like the thugs as police officers in A Clockwork Orange.

I suspect that the officers did hear, “This country sucks.” Among a lot of Americans, not reverentially standing during “God Bless America” is exactly the same thing. As it turns out, Campeau-Laurion was more bothered by the “God” than the “America.” But it hardly matters. As I wrote here recently, this is a typical conservative idea of freedom of speech: you can say whatever you want to, as long as you don’t. In this specific case, there really is no more perfect example of what a sham the First Amendment is: official government officers brutalized and humiliated someone because of his political and religious beliefs.

About six months after this happened, the ACLU of New York State filed a case, Campeau-Laurion v Raymond Kelly, The New York Yankees Partnership, et al (Challenging forced patriotism at Yankee Stadium). The court found rather quickly for Campeau-Laurion and made New York City pay him $10,000. But to me, that’s not nearly enough. To begin with, that’s not even chump change for the city. But more important, it is likely that the police officers are to this day unaware that their behavior was publicly criticized. Personally, I think the officers should have been found and fired.

I don’t say this out of a sense of vengeance. It is just a matter of sending a message to all law enforcement personnel: you are being watching. The government is great at doing things that have a chilling effect on journalists — so they don’t do their proper job. But somehow, the idea of having a chilling effect on police officers doing things that are not supposed to be part of their jobs is just a bridge too far. The police in this country can’t be held accountable at all.

If a police officer was caught disturbing a Christian praying before eating her hot dog, the case would be the talk of the nation for the next decade. But an atheist getting brutalized by the police for not having reverence for “God Bless America”? Most Americans just yawn. The mainstream media can’t be bothered to report it. But a bigoted baker who doesn’t want to put two male figurines on the top of a wedding cake is a martyr to liberal intolerance? Give me a break!

I learned from Matt Yglesias about The Conspiracy Theory Around Harry Reid’s Exercise Accident. As you have probably noticed, Harry Reid has been wearing sun glasses all the time now. And you may know that this is because his right eye (along with the bones in his face and ribs) was badly damaged in an exercising accident. But was it in exercising accident? Could it not have been that the mafia ruffed up the pugilistic Senator? Well, if you are a right wing freak, you think so. And if you are an “establishment” conservative like Byron York, well, then you are just asking questions.

Part of this conspiracy theory is just the result of the full embrace of postmodern analysis by the conservative movement. I still find it telling that conservatives abandoned their commitment to absolute values the movement they found themselves losing the argument on substance. But it is truly bizarre that so many of them went in the opposite direction to the belief that reality is whatever you say it is. That is the basis, after all, of Fox News. They aren’t lying when they claim to be “fair and balanced.” That’s because to them, “fair and balanced” is simply defined as what they are. The words have no meaning outside their propagandistic uses.

In the case of Harry Reid, conservatives just know he must be corrupt to the core. He is, after all, a politician. And a Democrat — or as conservatives would put it: not a Republican — not our “our team.” And he’s from Nevada. They’ve all seen The Godfather Part II, so they know that the mafia control the whole state. Given all of these things, Harry Reid must just be a puppet for the mob — a real life Pat Geary. The fact that the film took place in the 1950s doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter, as Matt Yglesias noted, the Vegas mob “was largely crushed in the 1980s.”

Another thing about Harry Reid that conservatives are skeptical about is just how he got to be so rich. But as with so many examples of conservative flights of fancy, the claim is not even true. Reid is rich — there’s no doubt of that. He’s is worth an estimated $6.8 million. But before he became a Senator, he was a successful attorney with a net worth of about a million dollars. The amount of money that he has now is “about what he would have obtained had he simply put his $1 million in the S&P 500 and reinvested the dividends.” If Harry Reid is corrupt, he sure is bad at it.

But the ultimate refutation of this claim that the mob got to him is the fact that Harry Reid is one of the most powerful politicians in the United States. As such, he has a security detail with him at all times. They were with him at the time of the accident. In fact, they drove him to the hospital. The story that the conspiracy mongers would have to tell would be something from Mission: Impossible with Tom Cruise coming in through the air ducts.

In addition to this, Yglesias noted that if the mob wanted to drive a point home, there are much better ways — like threatening to harm his family or threatening to expose him. But none of this matters. Conservatives claimed that Obama wasn’t a natural born citizen, even after they were shown his birth certificate and despite him being natural born regardless of his birthplace given that his mother was a citizen. Reality is whatever conservatives want to believe. But we won’t hear much more about this thing about Harry Reid because he isn’t President and he’s retiring anyway. But even in the time that I’ve been writing this article, Breitbart News published, Why Harry Reid’s Home Exercise Accident Story Does Not Add Up. And people wonder why we can’t even raise the minimum wage.

It’s typical of an amazing double standard in America that James O’Keefe is not on parole after having spent years in prison. It is certainly the case that he has done far more harm to individuals throughout the nation than any drug possession convict rotting in a federal prison right now. His totally deceitful ACORN “sting” ended with hundreds of honest people losing their jobs. Rather than doing due diligence, the mainstream media just followed the conservative media without doing any, I don’t know, journalism. And despite being scammed over that, the mainstream media have continued to follow his exploits as though they are something more than just a conservative hack using any technique at all to provide a false narrative of anything that conservatives currently don’t like.

This most recent case was O’Keefe’s hit on Cornell and then Barry University shows that he’s become a pathetic shadow of his former self. I’ll admit, it must be hard. After gaining the kind of attention that he has, people are understandably reticent to say anything that might get them into trouble. This newest video involves a student trying to start a club to help the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” But clearly, doing that alone would raise red flags. For one thing: it is illegal to solicit funds for terrorist groups. But that hardly matters.

At Barry, the “undercover agent” never makes much sense. But the one thing that came across to me the first time I heard it was that she was clearly not talking about supporting the group. As Gary Legum at Wonkette noted, it is all phrased as humanitarian work for the purpose of stopping terrorist activity. Of course, in their conservative minds, the idea that terrorism has anything to do with social factors and not just “evil people” is risible. But this is how the “agent” starts talking about what she wants to do:

Much later in her rambling discussion, she mentions providing flashlights to fighters — but that is the extent of the whole thing. And given that she mutters, has nothing to say, and the poor administer is used to listening to students prattle on, I don’t think there is anything to see her. But that gets to the heart of what is wrong with the current state of the James O’Keefe “sting.” They can’t even manage a clear — if libelous — statement of bad behavior by a “liberal.” What was done in this case was something like this:

Except that it would have a lot of “like” mixed in there. But the point is that in the entire video — which is highly edited — they never were able to show that this administrator understands what the student is up to. The “agent” was clearly trying to make it clear to the viewer what she meant but most distinctly not to the administrator. Legum noted what O’Keefe and company is trying to show:

And so there you have it. These bozos aren’t even aiming at the mainstream media anymore. O’Keefe has a great gig, doing the equivalent of comedy videos for the conservative movement. In this case, the “joke” is that all liberals believe that terrorism has social roots. And they know the truth that all that can be done is to bomb everyone back to the stone age. Because that’s worked so brilliantly up to now.

See Also

Are we Surprised by James O’Keefe?
Death as Public Good
O’Keefe Loses Lawsuit But Sadly Not Credibility
James O’Keefe’s Tired Cons

I was reading a recent article by Alfie Kohn, Four Reasons to Worry About “Personalized Learning.” It’s about this “new” thing in education that involves forcing kids to learn the same old test-based skills but allowing them to take a “learning path just for them.” It reminds me of those old computer games where you would wander around a haunted house; you could do anything you wanted, but there was only one way to get out of the garden and so on. The whole thing is entirely typical of the modern American approach to education: treat children as though they are widgets that must all be milled in the same way. God forbid we would do something that can’t be systematized.

But he started the article by bringing up Alexis de Tocqueville. Conservatives love to quote Democracy in America because it says Americans are exceptional. But it is hardly laudatory. In particular, he noted the strange dissonance between American individualism combined with the “relentless pressure to conform.” So the government isn’t legislating that you act like everyone else; the society does it without being told. This is something I have noticed in my own life: the last thing Americans like is an actual individual. Kohn quoted sociologist John W Meyer to the effect that we are “free to expand as a standardized individual.”

This goes along with a common view of conservatives, “You are free to say anything you want — as long as you don’t say anything too outrageous.” In other words: you have freedom to say whatever you want as long as you do not, in fact, say whatever you want. In some ways, I don’t have a problem with this. I believe in the right of neo-Nazis to go around denying the Holocaust. I also believe as a society that we should we should marginalize such people. But in America, the range of opinion that is deemed acceptable — the Overton Window — is razor thin. (Although our wonderful mainstream media has done quite a good job of making extreme right-wing views far more acceptable!)

Kohn noted, “how our pitiful individuality was screwed to the backs of our cars in the form of customized license plates.” That does have an appealing rigidity to it: in California at least, the “individual” is allowed up to 7 characters — which can now include a “heart” symbol! But I actually think it is worse than that. People now pay for the privilege of advertising corporations. At least with a license plate, the “individual” has to use the system to say something about themselves. With the corporate t-shirt, she only has to decide that she too uses that product. She’s a “Duck Dynasty” person or a “Miller Light” person or for the truly “outside the box” thinker, an “Ubuntu” user.

Along these lines, Kohn also mentioned the Burger King “Have it your way!” campaign, “[W]e were now empowered to request a recently thawed slab of factory-produced ground meat without the usual pickle — or even with extra lettuce! In America, I can be me!” Sadly, I’m afraid that in his sarcasm, he’s right. In my experience, my fellow countrymen are an incredibly banal lot. There is something about this country that tends to sap our innate differences.

Terry Eagleton discussed this in his last book, Across the Pond (see my review):

It is disheartening to think that, like so many things about us Americans, our loud-mouthed declarations of our individuality are just a cover for what we know to be true: we are a bunch of cowardly conformists. I’m not suggesting that we change. We are who we are. But we either need to stop claiming to be individualists or accept those among us who do stray outside the razor-thin breadth of what all red-blooded Americans think.

Afterword

And yes, I do consider myself an actual individual, although I have been hammered into a more compliant shape from decades of good ol’ American “individualism.”